The first sensation wasn't the threadbare blanket scratching against skin worn raw by years of neglect, nor the musty smell of mildew that permeated every corner of the cramped servant's quarters. It wasn't even the familiar ache of hunger gnawing at her hollow stomach like a persistent rat.
It was silence.
The absolute, terrifying silence where a voice should have been—a constant companion that had whispered guidance, offered sarcastic commentary, and provided the only friendship she'd known across ninety-nine lifetimes of trial and betrayal.
"Seven-Tee-Nine?"
Raven's mental call echoed through the vast emptiness of her consciousness, meeting nothing but the hollow reverberations of her own desperate hope. She tried again, pushing harder, reaching deeper into the spaces where his presence had always resided like a warm ember in the darkness of her thoughts.
"Seven-Tee-Nine, please. I know you're there. You have to be there."
Nothing.
The absence hit her like a physical blow, stealing the breath from her undernourished lungs. Her phoenix-shaped eyes—those distinctive orbs inherited from a grandmother she'd never known, now dulled to muddy brown by years of systematic poisoning—snapped open to stare at a ceiling she recognized with sickening clarity.
Water stains spread across the plaster like bruises, their familiar patterns mapping out years of rain seeping through rotted shingles that no one bothered to repair for the servant quarters. The single window, its glass so grimy it barely admitted light, cast the same weak gray illumination that had greeted her every morning in this wretched room.
She was back.
The realization hit her like a physical blow, driving the air from her lungs in a strangled gasp that she barely managed to muffle against her pillow. After two and a half millennia of existence, after ascending through realms of cultivation that defied mortal comprehension, after facing down cosmic horrors and emerging victorious from trials that would have shattered lesser souls—she was back in the body of seventeen-year-old Mara Brenner, lying on a straw mattress in the servants' wing of the Brenner family estate.
The memories crashed over her in waves—not the distant, manageable recollections she'd carried through her merit lives, but raw, bleeding wounds torn open by the soul tribulation. Novara's dissolving form. The taste of her own heart's blood in Amara's mouth. The endless cycle of death and rebirth, each one a fresh betrayal, a new lesson in cosmic cruelty.
Her small frame began to shake uncontrollably as rage and anguish warred within her chest, building pressure like steam in a sealed kettle. The urge to scream—to release a sound of such primal fury it would shatter every window in the estate—clawed at her throat. Her hands flew to her mouth, pressing desperately against lips that wanted to part and loose the accumulated howl of a hundred lifetimes.
No. Not here. Not like this.
Her teeth found the soft flesh of her palm, biting down hard enough to draw blood. The sharp, metallic taste flooded her mouth as she bore down harder, using physical pain to anchor herself against the tsunami of emotion threatening to drown her sanity. The need to scream transformed into something else—a cold, crystalline focus that she wrapped around her heart like armor.
She had survived this before. In dark caves and alien prisons, in moments when the weight of cosmic injustice had threatened to break her mind completely, she had learned the art of locking away what she could not afford to feel. Not suppression—that had nearly destroyed her in the soul tribulation—but temporary containment. A deliberate choice to feel the pain later, when she had the luxury of safety.
The trembling gradually subsided as she forced her breathing into the rhythmic patterns that had sustained her through a thousand different hells. The rage crystallized into something harder, more useful. The anguish transformed into determination sharp enough to cut diamonds.
Later. She would grieve later, rage later, let herself feel the full weight of what had been done to her. But not now. Now, she had work to do.
Her small hands rose to her face—callused from endless chores, marked by the jagged purple scar across her right wrist like a brand of shame. The skin felt wrong despite its sallow complexion. Too soft, too unmarked by the experiences that should have carved their wisdom into her very bones. Her fingers traced the fresh bruise on her left cheek, a tender reminder of yesterday's beating, and the familiar spike of helpless rage tried to claw its way up her throat.
But now it met something new. Something harder than diamond and colder than the void between stars.
Now she was not the frightened, powerless girl who had endured thirty years of systematic abuse and manipulation. Now she remembered.
Everything.
Sitting up slowly, Raven swung her legs over the edge of the narrow bed, her bare feet touching the rough wooden floor. The motion sent a wave of dizziness through her malnourished frame—this body was weak, pathetically so compared to the statuesque goddess she had been in her final cultivation life. But weakness was temporary. Bodies could be strengthened. Power could be reclaimed.
What mattered was understanding exactly where—and when—she had landed.
The calendar hanging crookedly on the wall caught her attention, its pages yellowed and water-stained but still legible. Her eyes traced the current date: 1st Day of Cycle 1, TC 1853. She must have returned just before midnight, she realized—during the final hours of the Void Days, when Ascara fell into neither day nor night but lingered in the liminal space between. Those five days each year when the world existed in twilight, a scar left over from the Great Upheaval over 1,853 years ago. How fitting that her cosmic journey should end where the world itself bore the wounds of ancient cataclysm.
But her trembling finger moved past today's date, tracing forward through the calendar pages until it stopped on another set of numbers that burned themselves into her vision like brands: 01.06.1853.
Oh, this date was engraved into her very soul. How many times had she lain beneath alien stars, thinking back to that exact morning? How many nights had she stared into the cosmic void and whispered this date like a prayer or a curse? The 6th Day of Cycle 1—the day that had taught her the meaning of the two most heartbreaking words in any language across any realm:
If only.
If only she had been stronger. If only she had seen through Amara's schemes. If only she had fought back instead of accepting her fate with the resigned despair of the thoroughly broken.
The familiar spiral of self-recrimination began to pull at her thoughts, threatening to drag her toward that other date—TC 1858, the day everything had truly ended. No. She slammed that door shut before the memories could take hold. That path led to madness, to the kind of rage that would see her tear through this house like an avenging demon, painting the walls with the blood of everyone who had ever wronged her.
Not yet. Not until she was ready.
But the irony wasn't lost on her. She who had conquered realms and faced down cosmic entities had been undone by something as simple as a drugged drink and a false accusation. The girl who would become Raven—who would transcend mortality itself—had been destroyed by the petty schemes of mortals too small to comprehend the magnitude of what they were unleashing.
Today was the beginning of everything. In five days, Amara would make her move. In five days, the trap would be sprung that would chain Mara Brenner to thirty years of hell.
But this time, she knew it was coming.
The absence of Seven-Tee-Nine's familiar presence gnawed at her like an infected wound. In all her lives, through every death and rebirth, he had been there—sardonic, logical, occasionally insufferable, but constant as gravity. The memory of their first meeting rose unbidden, as clear and sharp as if it had happened yesterday instead of over two millennia ago...
Flashback: First ContactMerit World #1 - The Frozen Realm of Thyrallia
Consciousness returned like a slap across the face, sudden and brutal and accompanied by the kind of bone-deep cold that turned breath to crystals in the lungs. Mara—she had still been Mara then, the name not yet burned away by pain and rage—found herself lying in snow so white it hurt to look at, surrounded by a landscape that belonged in fever dreams rather than reality.
The sky above stretched in impossible shades of purple and blue, colors that shifted and swirled like liquid aurora across a canvas of stars visible even in daylight. Trees unlike anything she had ever seen twisted toward the alien heavens—their bark silver as mirrors, their leaves crystalline and singing with musical chimes whenever the wind touched them. The very air tasted of ozone and something indefinably other, as if the fundamental laws of physics had been rewritten by a cosmic poet with a taste for the surreal.
"What... where am I?" she whispered, her voice small and lost in the vast frozen wilderness.
That's when she heard it—a sound like electronic static mixed with the whisper of distant waterfalls, resolving slowly into something that might charitably be called a voice.
"Designation: Human Subject, Merit Acquisition Candidate. Status: Functional. Beginning orientation protocols."
Mara scrambled to her feet, spinning wildly as she searched for the source of the voice. There was nothing—no figure, no device, no visible explanation for the words that seemed to emanate from the very air around her.
"Who's there? Show yourself!"
"Visual manifestation is unnecessary for current interaction parameters. I am Autonomous Overseer 7T9, the Seventh Tasking Nexus of the Ninth Alignment, Custodian Adjunct of the Great Transcendent Network, Iteration Prime of the Celestial Protocols. I have been assigned to facilitate your merit acquisition journey across the designated trial realms."
Mara blinked once. Twice. The absurdly grandiose title hung in the frigid air like icicles waiting to fall, each word more pretentious than the last. In another time, another life, she might have been intimidated by such cosmic authority. Instead, she found herself fighting back what might have been the first genuine smile to cross her lips in years.
"Yeah, no," she said firmly, her breath misting in the alien cold. "I'm calling you Seven-Tee-Nine."
There was a pause—brief, but somehow conveying the digital equivalent of sputtered indignation.
"That designation is... insufficient. My full title encompasses eons of service to the—"
"Seven-Tee-Nine," she repeated, crossing her arms despite the cold seeping through her thin clothes. "You can be my cosmic babysitter if you want, but I'm not going to spend however long this takes stumbling over syllables every time I need to get your attention."
Another pause, longer now, as if her assigned overseer was processing this unprecedented breach of protocol.
"...Acceptable. For efficiency purposes, the abbreviated designation may be utilized."
And just like that, across a frozen alien landscape under an impossible sky, the most important friendship of her existence had begun.
The memory faded, leaving Raven alone in the gray dawn light filtering through her grimy window. The ache of his absence felt like a physical wound, threatening to drag her back into the despair that had defined so much of her existence. But alongside the grief came something else—something that made her pulse quicken with an emotion she hadn't felt in millennia.
Hope.
She was back. Before Amara's scheme. Before the marriage trap. Before everything that had led to thirty years of hell and ninety-nine lives of cosmic trials. This wasn't just survival—this was opportunity.
He'll be back, she told herself with fierce certainty. He has to be. Whatever cosmic forces sent me back here, they wouldn't leave me to face this alone. Not after everything we've been through together.
But until then, she would have to rely on the one thing that had never failed her: her own strength.
Rising from the bed, Raven moved to the cracked mirror hanging above the washbasin. The face that stared back was achingly familiar—heart-shaped features made gaunt by malnutrition, dull black hair that hung limp and lifeless around shoulders that seemed too narrow to carry the weight of her experiences. Her skin was sallow, marked by stress and poor nutrition that had been her constant companions, while fresh acne dotted her cheeks like angry accusations.
But it was the eyes that held her attention. Those distinctive phoenix-shaped orbs, tilted like a cat's in a way that marked her unmistakably as her grandmother's descendant. The shape remained true to her heritage, but the color had been leached to muddy brown by years of systematic poisoning. Selene's doing—keeping her true nature hidden beneath layers of toxins and neglect, ensuring that no one would recognize the bloodline that should have guaranteed her protection.
Not anymore, she thought, her reflection's lips curving into something that wasn't quite a smile. Now I know what's coming. Now I'm ready.
Closing her eyes, she reached inward, feeling for the familiar presence that should have been nestled in her spiritual core. For a heart-stopping moment, she found nothing—just the weak, barely-formed channels of spiritual energy that belonged to an untrained seventeen-year-old girl who had never even heard of cultivation.
Then she felt it.
Deep within her soul space—barely forty cubic centimeters of accessible area from what should have been a vast realm—ten points of light pulsed with gentle warmth. The blood beads, her inheritance from ninety-nine lifetimes of trial and triumph, each one containing power that could reshape worlds. They lay dormant now, their true nature sealed and waiting, but they were there. Ready to awaken when she had grown strong enough to bear their weight.
The Dragon's bead pulsed red-gold, containing the fury of stars and the cleansing fire of rebirth. The Phoenix glowed with earthen strength, promising the patience to endure and the power to rise from any ashes. Eight others waited in the shadows—Wood, Water, Metal, Wind, Lightning, Darkness, Light, and at the center, something that defied classification. Something golden and warm that whispered of infinite possibilities.
Soon, she promised them silently. Soon, I'll be strong enough to claim what you offer. But for now, I have work to do.
Even as she focused on the beads, she could feel the strain building in her young body. Her soul power—just a fraction of what she once wielded—pressed against the boundaries of what this mortal frame could contain. The cosmic forces that had bound most of her strength weren't cruel, she realized. They were protective. Without those restraints, attempting to channel even a thousandth of her true power would have torn this weak vessel apart like wet paper.
But what remained was still beyond anything this world had ever seen.
Opening her eyes, Raven turned away from the mirror and began to plan. The scheme that would trap her in marriage to Kael was only five days away. It wasn't much time—barely a heartbeat in the span of cosmic existence—but it would have to be enough.
She flexed her fingers experimentally, feeling the constrained soul power that thrummed beneath her skin like caged lightning. Even limited to what this fragile body could safely channel, what she had access to was enough to turn the tables on Amara and her petty schemes.
Five days to prepare. Five days to set her own trap. Five days to ensure that when Amara came with her aphrodisiacs and fertility drugs, when she orchestrated that humiliating "discovery" in the hotel room, it would be Amara who found herself ensnared instead of her intended victim.
The thought of Amara's shock when her perfect plan crumbled to dust sent a surge of vicious satisfaction through Raven's chest. Let the woman who had stolen her life, her name, and her future discover what it meant to cross someone who had faced down cosmic horrors and emerged victorious.
Amara thought she had won by stealing a place in the family, by orchestrating decades of abuse and manipulation. She had no idea that her greatest triumph had just become her ultimate doom.
Because Mara Brenner was not the frightened, powerless girl who could be broken by cruelty and manipulation.
She was Raven—tested by cosmos, tempered in the forges of a hundred worlds, and armed with the knowledge of exactly how this story was supposed to end.
Five days. She had five days to prepare before the banquet that would have rained down humiliation on her, torn away all her dreams and chained her to Kael. Five days to ensure that the tragedy that had defined her existence would never come to pass.
The void had ended. Her true battle was about to begin.
The weak gray light filtering through the grimy window began to strengthen as dawn broke over the Brenner estate, but Raven remained motionless at the mirror. Her muddy brown eyes reflected something that would have terrified anyone wise enough to recognize it.
Justice, she thought, her small hands clenching into fists at her sides. Not revenge. Justice. For the girl I was, for the woman I became, for every dream they crushed beneath their ambitions.
I choose my own fate.