Death was quieter than Ryomen had imagined.
No blinding light. No judgment. No voice asking questions it already knew the answers to.
Just silencethin, endless, and strangely calm.
Then came weight.
A pressure far too heavy for a dead man's chest. A slow, rhythmic thumping that wasn't his heartnot the one he remembered. Warmth surrounded him, muffled sounds pressing in from every direction.
Crying.
High. Fragile. New.
Ryomen understood before panic could set in.
I'm alive.
Not reincarnated in some abstract sense. Not floating in a void waiting for a status screen. He was here, inside a body that barely knew how to breathe, wrapped in silk and spellwork far more refined than anything Earth had ever produced.
The world smelled different. Manaraw and unfilteredhung in the air like oxygen.
He tried to move. Failed.
Figures.
His mind, however, was sharp. Too sharp for a newborn. Memories stacked neatly where chaos should have been: anime marathons, late-night manga binges, fanfics read with a critic's eye, arguments about power scaling that never really ended. Stories of heroes who rushed forward and died early. Of villains who underestimated "side characters." Of protagonists who revealed everything too soon and paid the price.
Ryomen had learned from all of them.
First rule, he told himself calmly.
Do not stand out.
A voice echoed nearbydeep, restrained, heavy with something unspoken.
"He's quiet."
Another voice answered, softer, tired but warm. "He's watching."
The pressure lifted. Light stabbed through half-lidded eyes, blurred and unfocused. Shapes formed slowly: towering figures, banners embroidered with gold, a ceiling carved with runes that pulsed faintly like a sleeping beast.
Royalty.
Not the theatrical kind. The dangerous kind.
He felt it before he understood itthreads. Invisible, innumerable, stretching outward from him into the world. Every sound, every motion, every breath tugged gently at them.
Causality.
Not as a concept. As a sense.
Something shifted when the man stepped closer. The air trembled, just barely. A priest nearby stiffened, frowning as if something had brushed against his mind and slipped away before he could grasp it.
The manhis father, Ryomen realized distantlyrested a hand on the cradle.
For a heartbeat, the threads tightened.
Then loosened.
The man inhaled sharply.
"…He lives," he said, voice low. "That alone is enough."
Ryomen did not understand the weight of those words yet.
But some instinct deep within him did.
That night, the palace slept uneasily.
Candles flickered without wind. Guards swore they heard footsteps in sealed corridors. A court mage woke screaming from a dream he could not remember, only the certainty that something had gone wrong.
In the highest chamber of the Arker Palace, two figures stood beside a cradle etched with imperial sigils.
One wore a crown. The other bore scars that magic could not erase.
"The seal is holding," the woman said quietly. "For now."
"It has to," the crowned man replied. "If they sense him"
"They won't," she interrupted, though her hand tightened at her side. "Not yet."
In the cradle, the infant slept.
No. Pretended to sleep.
Ryomen listened.
He felt the seal like a veil drawn across his existence, dampening something vast and dangerous within him. Not suppressing ithiding it. A clever, desperate thing woven from blood, oath, and something older than the empire itself.
Nephalem blood, though the word meant nothing to him yet.
Still, he understood the intent.
Survive.
Years passed quietly.
Ryomen grew as princes were expected to growstrong, healthy, polite. Tutors praised his focus. Sword instructors noted his balance. Magic instructors frowned at his restraint.
He never pushed mana too hard. Never trained until collapse. Never chased brilliance.
Instead, he refined.
Stances from a dozen fictional worlds blended into one efficient form. Breathing patterns borrowed from stories optimized his stamina. Mental drillsvisualization, repetition, failure analysissharpened his control far beyond what his age suggested.
When he slipped during training, the ground was always a fraction less slick than it should have been.
When a sparring partner overextended, it was always at the worst possible momentfor them.
People called it talent.
Some whispered luck.
Ryomen smiled and accepted both.
At night, alone in his chambers, he tested the edges of that unseen sense. Never directly. Just enough to confirm it was real.
A candle flame flickered when he expected it to.
A dropped glass shattered away from his feet instead of toward them.
A servant entered a room exactly when Ryomen needed a witnessand never when he didn't.
Causality responded not to commands, but to intent.
That was the most dangerous part.
Good, he thought. Commands can be traced.
On his tenth birthday, a messenger arrived from the frontier.
Demons.
The word spread through the palace like poison. Minor incursions, the report said. Nothing the border legions couldn't handle. Still, priests increased their patrols. Wards were reinforced. Old weapons were brought out of storage.
Ryomen stood at a balcony, watching banners snap in the wind.
Something stirred deep within him at the mention of demons. Not hatred. Not fear.
Recognition.
Far away, in a place where the sky burned black and red, a demon commander paused mid-sentence.
"…No," it muttered, confusion bleeding into its voice. "That's impossible."
"What is?" another asked.
The commander's claws trembled.
"I felt it," it said slowly. "For just a moment."
"What did you feel?"
Silence stretched.
"…A mistake."
Back in the palace, Ryomen turned away from the balcony.
Not yet, he reminded himself.
Too early.
The world did not need a monster.
It needed a prince.
And when the time camewhen the threads of fate tightened enough to snap
He would pull.