Weaver opened his eyes to a headache that felt earned.
Not the dull punishment of sleeplessness. Not the hangover ache of cheap sugar and fluorescent light. This was a bright, intrusive pressure behind the eyes—like someone had pushed a thumb against the inside of his skull and held it there, patient and deliberate, waiting for him to notice.
He tried to inhale and found the air wrong.
Cool. Dry. Tinged with something metallic and sweet, the way old incense clung to fabric long after the fire had died. His tongue tasted faint ash.
He blinked.
A desk sat beneath his forearms.
Not his desk.
The wood was black and polished to a depth that suggested it had never been allowed to be scratched. The surface held a dark shine—less like varnish, more like still water pretending to be wood. Papers lay scattered in careful disarray, their edges weighted by carved stones and a thin strip of red silk, as if even the mess had been arranged.
For a second, he didn't move. He only listened.
No hum of an air conditioner. No distant traffic through a window. No phones. No soft scuffle of guards in the corridor outside his room.
Silence.
Not absence. A held breath.
Weaver's fingers tightened on the desk edge.
His mind tried to perform the old reflex—label what you are experiencing, file it into something survivable.
Dream.
He had nightmares sometimes. Everyone who lived inside a schedule had nightmares. This could be one. The desk, the smell, the ash—his brain recycling imagery from whatever web novel he'd eaten last night.
He tried to stand.
His body responded.
Not sluggishly. Not begrudgingly.
It responded like a blade leaving its sheath.
The sudden obedience shocked him so hard he pushed back without meaning to, and the chair skidded. He went with it, half rising, half falling—an ugly, startled lurch that sent him stumbling sideways. His shoulder clipped the edge of the desk. The contact should've hurt.
It didn't.
It registered as information. A light impact. A minor misstep.
Nothing more.
Weaver caught himself on the floor with one hand, palm flat, and froze there like a man who had just touched a live wire and survived.
His breath came fast.
His heart steady. Not panicking with him. Not racing like prey. It beat with a calm, measured insistence that made his own fear feel… irrelevant.
He lifted his hand in front of his face.
Long fingers. Clean nails. A faint sheen on the skin like it had been oiled, not by vanity, but by ritual. No calluses. No bruising. No fatigue tremor.
He flexed the hand.
The motion was perfect. Too perfect. The tendons moved beneath the skin like they'd been taught to perform for an audience.
Weaver pushed himself upright slowly, eyes scanning the room.
The chamber was lit by a pale, diffuse glow from somewhere above—no visible bulbs, no modern angles. Shadows lay clean and soft, like they'd been corrected.
The walls were a muted stone, almost white, carved with shallow, repeating motifs that reminded him of feathers and waves at once. A low brazier sat cold in one corner, ashes packed down like someone had snuffed it carefully. Near the desk, a narrow stand held a strip of cloth draped over something long and sword shaped.
Across from him, a mirror rested against the far wall.
It was tall. Dark-framed. The frame itself was carved with cranes mid-flight—wings spread, beaks open, bodies caught in motion that felt less like beauty and more like instruction.
Weaver stared at it and felt his stomach tighten.
Mirrors were honest only when they were allowed to be.
He took one step toward it.
His footfall made almost no sound.
He took another.
He reached the mirror.
And for a fraction of a second, it didn't show him.
It showed a stranger.
Then the stranger's eyes moved exactly when his did, and the lie snapped into alignment.
Weaver's throat went dry.
The face looking back was not his.
It was… too clean.
The bones were arranged with surgical precision, symmetry that didn't exist in nature unless someone had forced it. The jawline was sharp without looking gaunt. The cheekbones sat high like a sculptor had decided where authority should live and carved it there. His skin was pale in a way that didn't look sick—it looked unwounded. Untouched by sunlight, stress, or the petty decay of time.
His hair fell loose, long and black, framing his face in heavy strands that caught the light like ink poured slowly over marble.
And his eyes—
Weaver leaned closer.
They were not brown. Not black. Not the colour of anything that belonged to a normal inheritance.
They were pale, almost silver, with a strange clarity—like polished metal catching a distant star. In each iris, faint light threaded in a cross-like shimmer, a clean starburst pattern that made his gaze look less like sight and more like judgement.
Even in this soft light, the eyes seemed to hold their own glow.
Weaver swallowed.
He lifted a hand and touched the skin beneath one eye, as if touching could explain.
At his temple, near the hairline on the right side, a red mark cut across the skin.
Not a smear.
A brand.
It looked like a feather-slice—sharp, angled, slightly jagged, as if someone had pressed a heated crest into flesh and let the flesh remember the shape forever. It wasn't positioned like decoration. It sat where a person would place a signature if they were signing his face.
Weaver traced it with two fingers.
The skin was raised there, subtly warmer. Not painful. Alive.
A Tell.
A sect-mark.
He didn't know how he knew that. The knowledge arrived fully formed, the way instincts arrived: without permission.
Weaver pulled back from the mirror in a sudden, hard motion, as if the reflection might reach through and claim him.
He turned toward the desk again.
Papers.
Ink.
Diagrams.
He approached them the way he'd approach a stranger's open file—careful, hungry, immediately suspicious.
The top page held dense characters written in a script he had never studied.
And yet he understood it.
Not by translation. Not by effort.
He understood it the way you understood your own name when someone said it behind you.
PATH TO GODHOOD, the heading read in his mind, even though his eyes were staring at strokes that should have been meaningless.
Beneath it: RED SWAN SECT. WAYCRAFT. PROOF. SCAR.
His vision swam, not from nausea, but from the sudden violence of recognition.
This wasn't a dream.
Dreams didn't hand you concepts like weapons and expect you to know how to use them.
He flipped a page.
A map.
Eight continents were drawn in ink—each one outlined with careful detail, mountains indicated by tiny serrations, rivers by thin blue lines. Names were written along the coasts. There were marks for sect territories, symbols at cardinal points, routes like veins.
But at the centre of the map—
There was a hole.
Not drawn.
A hole punched clean through the paper, as if someone had taken a heated coin and pressed it down until the world gave way. The edges were scorched. The missing piece was larger than a city. Larger than a kingdom.
Around that absence, a red circle had been drawn, thick and angry.
And in the margin, a single note, written so hard the ink had bled:
VERMILLION REACH.
Weaver's hand hovered over the hole without touching it.
A memory twitched at the back of his skull, a voice saying erased from history like a clerk stamping a document.
He stared at the hole until it felt like it stared back.
In that moment—since opening his eyes—Weaver felt it with absolute clarity:
He was not in the place from his dream.
He was in the consequence of it.
His mouth opened.
No sound came out at first. His throat didn't know what language to pick.
"What… am I?" he managed finally, and even the whisper sounded wrong in this room, like a stain.
He tried to think back.
Where was he before this?
Who was he before this?
His mind reached for the familiar anchor of his first life—his room, the city light, the photograph on the wall, his father's smile like a cut—
But the images came up slippery. Incomplete. Like someone had wiped a board mid-sentence.
He realized, with a small spike of terror, that he was trying to remember too much at once. His thoughts were flailing through a vault without knowing what he was actually searching for
He needed a blueprint. A smaller question.
A simple question.
What was I doing before I was here?
The answer didn't come as a sentence.
It came as fragments.
A rush of heat at the base of the throat.
Hands moving fast over paper.
The smell of incense turned bitter.
A candle flame bending, then going blue.
A voice—his own?—counting under breath.
A circle drawn in ash.
A bowl of dark liquid trembling with light.
Someone—Amos—speaking to himself with urgency, like a man racing a knife.
No time. No more time.
Amos. The name didn't feel like his. It felt like the label on the body… a label the world had already deleted.
Another fragment: pain behind the eyes, not the headache he woke with, but something sharper—something like the soul resisting being pulled into a shape it wasn't built for.
A final fragment: a word written again and again until the ink tore the paper.
ASSIMILATION
Weaver staggered back from the desk and nearly tripped over the chair.
He grabbed the desk edge hard enough that the wood creaked faintly—an offended, restrained sound.
His head spun.
The fragments weren't memories like his were memories. They weren't clean scenes with context and continuity.
They were distorted, rushed, incomplete—like someone had recorded the last ten minutes of a life on damaged film and shoved the reel into his skull.
He looked down at the page again.
Path to godhood.
He looked up at the mirror.
At those eyes that did not belong to any normal lineage.
At the Tell burned into the temple like a crest.
His breath stopped.
Then he straightened slowly, the way a man straightened when he realized the floor beneath him wasn't a floor but a precipice.
"This can't be," he whispered, and the words came out as disbelief and prayer at once. "No—"
He read the next line on the page. His eyes skimmed it. His mind understood it instantly, brutally:
BODY: COMPLETED
SOUL: FAILED TO ASSIMILATE (Need More Time)
ERASURE: IMMINENT
Weaver's stomach turned.
He looked at his own hands again—so steady, so wrong.
The fragments snapped together with the kind of logic he hated most: the logic that made sense even when it ruined you.
The original owner of this body had been trying to become a god.
Not metaphorically. Not spiritually.
Mechanically.
He'd been rushing a ritual.
A shortcut. A theft.
He had succeeded in shaping the body.
He had failed to seat the soul.
And if the broadcast was true—if the verdict was real—then the moment he was marked as a consequence of Vermillion Reach, the world would have tried to erase him.
Erase Amos.
Erase the lineage.
Erase the story.
Weaver's lips parted.
A laugh came out—thin, disbelieving, almost hysterical.
Then it died in his throat as he felt the weight of the conclusion.
"My soul…" he whispered.
Not Amos's. Not the one who'd rushed the ritual.
Mine.
His soul—the boy who had wanted freedom so badly he'd spoken it like a joke—had slipped into the empty seat.
Like a coin falling into a machine that didn't care which hand fed it.
Weaver stared into the mirror, eyes catching light like cut stars.
He didn't feel holy.
He felt like he'd been misfiled.
And yet—
His body stood without fatigue.
His heartbeat was calm.
His gaze looked like something that could command a room without speaking.
He lifted a hand and the air around his fingers felt… attentive, in a way air had never felt in his first life. Not power. Not warmth. Just the faint impression that the world was waiting to see what he would do.
His head was still spinning with the fragments, with the scorched hole in the map, with the phrase erased from history echoing like policy.
But a single thought rose clean through the chaos, undeniable as a bell:
He had landed in a god's body.
And somewhere there was an empty space where Weaver's soul had been removed.
A deletion.
A correction.
Weaver's jaw tightened.
He stared at his own reflection until his eyes stopped feeling like strangers.
Then, very softly—like speaking it too loudly might alert the sky—he said the only sentence that fit the moment:
"I'm a god."
It didn't sound triumphant.
It sounded like a man reading his own execution order and realizing the paper was written on his skin.
The word god barely finished leaving his mouth before the room reminded him what rooms were for.
Footsteps.
Not distant. Not imagined. Real enough that the sound had shape—leather soles against stone, unhurried, confident. People who belonged here.
Weaver's head snapped toward the door.
The air changed with the sound. Not pressure. Not fear. Something subtler. Expectation. As if the room itself had noticed him and was waiting to see whether he would survive the next few seconds.
His thoughts scattered, then forced themselves back into order.
Think.
This was not his world. Not his rules. He had fragments—maps, words, the echo of a ritual—but no framework yet. No mechanics. No authority.
If this was a sect world, then rooms mattered. Ownership mattered. Boundaries were enforced with blood.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Weaver's eyes flicked once more to the desk. To the papers. To the mirror.
To the Tell burned into his temple.
Too visible.
He lifted a hand halfway, then stopped. Touching it now would be instinct, not strategy.
The door opened.
Two men stepped inside.
They were not dressed like guards. No armour. No weapons displayed openly. They wore layered robes of muted greys and brown, patterns subtle enough to disappear unless you knew what to look for. Both carried themselves the same way—loose, relaxed, alert. The posture of men who had killed before and did not need to announce it.
One of them shut the door behind them.
Click.
The sound landed heavier than it should have.
The taller man spoke first, eyes already scanning the room. "This is a restricted chamber."
His gaze slid over the desk, the scattered papers, the mirror.
Then it stopped on Weaver.
The second man smiled faintly. Not friendly. Evaluative. "No one is meant to be here."
Weaver waited.
He knew—dimly, distantly—that he should be afraid.
Someone had just told him he was somewhere forbidden. In any world, that sentence ended with punishment.
And yet—
His chest was calm.
His heart beat evenly, almost bored.
There was no adrenaline spike. No survival panic. The emotion simply… didn't arrive.
That absence frightened him more than fear would have.
He forced himself to speak before silence betrayed him.
"I'm Amos," he said.
The name surfaced without effort, pulled from the fragments still rattling in his skull. He let it settle on his tongue, tested the weight of it. "Red Swan Sect."
The taller man's eyebrows lifted, just a fraction.
The other man's smile widened.
"Oh?" he said lightly. "Red Swan."
Weaver nodded once, careful not to overdo it. "I was… moved. For my safety."
That much felt true. Or close enough to be dangerous.
The two men exchanged a glance.
The taller one leaned casually against the wall, arms crossing. "Funny," he said. "I don't remember any what was it, Red Swan being moved here."
Weaver exhaled slowly, letting irritation colour his voice instead of fear. "You wouldn't. It wasn't formal."
The second man laughed—soft, genuine, almost warm. "Of course it wasn't."
He stepped closer.
Weaver registered the distance without reacting. Two steps. Three.
Close enough that Weaver could smell him—ink, dried herbs, something faintly sweet and poisonous.
The man tilted his head, studying Weaver's face.
"And you chose this room?" he asked. "Paper Fox private chambers. Bold, Amos."
Weaver allowed himself a thin smile. "I was told foxes were good at hiding things."
The taller man snorted. "That's one way to put it."
For a moment—just a moment—the tension eased.
They laughed.
Not loudly. Not cruelly. The sound of men sharing an absurdity.
Weaver almost believed he'd succeeded.
Almost.
Then the smiling man moved.
There was no wind-up. No warning. One step, a blur of motion—
—and his hand drove forward.
Pain arrived all at once.
Not sharp.
Total.
Weaver felt the intrusion before he felt the damage. Fingers—no, something harder, reinforced—sliding into the space just below his ribs, exactly where a body was weakest.
His breath left him in a violent rush.
The world tilted.
The man leaned in close, voice still conversational, almost apologetic.
"If you're going to lie," he said quietly, "at least make it believable."
Weaver looked down.
The man's hand was buried in his abdomen.
Blood spread fast, soaking the fabric, dark and warm.
The taller man sighed. "No circulation."
He crouched, peering at Weaver's face. "There's no Dao moving in you. Not even residue. No cultivator forgets how to breathe."
The hand withdrew.
Weaver collapsed.
Stone met his knees. Then his palms. Then his shoulder.
The room swam.
His mind raced—not with fear, but with furious clarity.
Of course.
Of course they killed him.
Suspicion was enough. Incorrect presence was enough. In a world like this, uncertainty was the crime.
He tasted blood and laughed weakly.
The man who stabbed him stepped back, wiping his hand on a cloth. "Red Swan Sect," he muttered. "Never heard of it."
Weaver tried to speak.
Only air came out.
The taller man looked down at him, expression neutral. "You should've picked a better lie."
They turned to leave.
Weaver lay there, blood pooling beneath him again—déjà vu layered on top of itself until it felt obscene.
So, this is how it is, he thought dimly.
Different world. Same logic.
Judge first. Kill cleanly. Sleep afterward.
His vision blurred.
He thought of his first death. Of the crowd that hadn't helped. Of the way people decided guilt by proximity and called it morality.
A bitter thought surfaced, clear as glass:
No matter the world, people are the same.
Titles changed. Powers changed. The cruelty stayed efficient.
As his consciousness began to slip, something clicked.
Soft. Metallic.
The pendant at his chest—golden, heavy, something he hadn't examined yet—shifted against his sternum.
Light spilled out.
Not violently.
Not dramatically.
Golden wisps unfurled like breath in cold air, threading around his body, seeping into the wound, not closing it—but refusing to let it finish him.
Weaver felt it then.
Not pain.
Denial.
Darkness folded in.
—
Weaver opened his eyes.
He was sitting at the desk.
The same desk.
Black wood. Still surface. Papers scattered exactly as before.
No blood.
No wound.
His head throbbed.
Slowly, carefully, he raised his hand.
It moved.
Weaver stared at it for a long time.
"What the fuck?"