Pain.
Not the stinging, sterile pain of bullets — Lucien had plenty of experience with that. This was different. This was old pain. Deep pain. The type which roots in a body for years — festering into the bones like lichen on iron.
Every joint ached. Every muscle screamed. His chest was a bag of wet sand, and each breath became a negotiation between his lungs and whatever broken creature occupied them.
Lucien opened his eyes. A ceiling. Wooden. Cracked. The room, which was barely big enough for his bed. The walls were rough stone. The coverlet that lay over him was a poor patched thing in three places.
The air was scented with herbs, wood smoke, and poverty. This was not his penthouse. He tried to sit up. His body refused.
His arms were skinny — scarily so. He held up a hand before his eyes and looked at it. His fingers were thin and bony, the skin of his hands an almost translucent pale with bluish veins that stood out like rivers on a map. These were not the hands of Lucien Graves. These were the hands of someone who had been ill for a very long time.
[ ABYSSAL SOVEREIGN SYSTEM — STATUS ]
[ HOST: LUCIEN GRAVES ( SOUL ) / ARIC VELDEN ( BODY ) ]
[ AGE: 18 YEARS OLD ]
[ RANKING: UNAWAKENED ]
[ CONDITION : SEVERE STARVATION / CHRONIC DISEASES / INTEGRATION OF THE SOUL
- 34._PERCENT COMPLETED ]
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: FULL-BODY RECONSTRUCTION TO COMMENCE UPON 'INTEGRATION'. ESTIMATED TIME — 72 HOURS ]
The blue transparent window floated in the space before his eyes― unseen for everyone but him.
Words were written in a sober, crisp hand and flashed against a dark background that throbbed softly like the beating of a heart. It bore no resemblance to the game interfaces he'd glimpsed on television screens as they zipped past in his old life.
This was a page from something old. Something that predated humanity's naming of power. Lucien stared at it.
Read it twice. Three times.
Aric Velden.
This body was called that.
This weak, crippled little body he treated as if it would break apart if he blew too hard.
He was not in New Verona anymore. He was no longer on Earth. He was elsewhere — somewhere identified as Vyranthos, if his memories from the void were to be believed.
He thought the status window away. It obeyed at once — fading away like smoke.
Reincarnation.
The word felt absurd. The sort of thing that desperate people believed, providing a way to deal with the finality of death. And yet here he was. New body. New world. The one bonded to his soul that spoke in blue windows and addressed him as Sovereign.
Lucien Graves had no faith in miracles. But he believed in opportunities.
And his — whatever it was — was an opening. The door creaked open. His body tensed instinctively — a reflex born of a lifetime spent anticipating violence beyond every door that opened. His eyes narrowed to the door, chilly and hard yet the flesh was frail that housed them.
A woman stepped inside. She was in her early forties but the creases on her face gave evidence that life had thrown more years at her than she deserved. She had chestnut hair that fell to her shoulders, and there were gray streaks at the temples.
Her eyes were warm brown — that brown color of the kind of eyes that had cried too much, but still preferred to smile. Her simple dress was patched at the hem and her apron dusted with flour. Her hands were rough from working — callused, reddened; the hands of a woman who had spent years holding her family together by dint of sheer stubborn will.
She held in her hand a wooden tray. There was steam coming off it — some kind of broth.
And when she looked at his open eyes, the bowl almost dropped from her hand.
" Aric?" Her voice broke on the name. Trembling, she placed the bowl on top of the bedside table and knelt beside it.
Her hands touched his face — warm against cold skin —and she tilted it slightly to seek his eyes, as though searching for some kind of proof that he was real.
" You're awake. Oh gods — you're awake." Tears spilled down her cheeks. She didn't wipe them. She barely seemed to register them.
"Three days. You didn't open your eyes for three days. The healer said — she said in preparation for—" Her voice burnt up. She leaned her forehead against his hand and cried.
Lucien stared at her. It was the only time in his thirty-four years of life — his real life — that anyone had cried for him. Not like this. Not with this raw, unfiltered, desperate relief. He had been feared. Respected. Obeyed. But never this. He had never been mourned until he was dying. Never held like something precious.
Aric Velden's memories wafted through his mind like smoke — fragmented, amorphous, yet there.
The system had gifted him the boy's memories in the exchange of souls. He saw childhood illness. Fevers that lasted weeks. A body too feeble to run, to play, to train. But through every single memory — and I mean every single one of them — this woman was there.
Holding him during the fevers. Singing to him when he couldn't sleep. Holding down three jobs so she could pay for the medicine that kept him alive another month.
Elena Velden. His mother. Or rather — Aric's mother. Something stirred in Lucien's chest. Not of white pain in his bruised body. Something deeper. Something he didn't know the name for. It existed in a place he'd closed off when he was twelve and decided love was being vulnerable and sentimentally suicidal.
He didn't know what to do with it. So he did what he could. He put his own hand, hard and thin and tremulous (so pathetically weak!) on top of her head.
" I'm here," he said. His voice was hoarse. Barely a rasp. But Elena sobbed harder. She gripped the hand as if she imagined it to be what held her tethered to earth.
The door burst open again. A girl appeared, as if she were a small tornado — chestnut hair untamed and windswept, blue eyes rimmed in red and round, torn crust still grasped in one hand.
She was small for fourteen, freckles tossed across her nose and cheeks burnished from running. She stood there in the doorway, breath huffing out of her chest, staring at him.
" Big Brother?" Aria Velden. The memories bubbled up anew — harder this time. This girl who sat by his bed and read to him when he was too weak to sit up.
This little girl sneaking extra food from her own plate onto his when she thought nobody was looking.
This girl crying in the hallway when the healer said he might not make it through winter — crying softly, with her hand over her mouth, because she didn't want to wake up her mother.
This girl who loved with all the force of her useless, dying brother. Aria's lip trembled. The bread fell from her hand. And then she was moving — launching herself onto the bed so hard his aching frame screamed in protest, wrapping her thin arms around his neck, burying her face against his chest.
"You idiot!" she shouted, her voice barely audible, cracking.
"You dumb — dumb — you can't do that! You can't just — three days! Three days, I thought you were —" She was unable to complete her sentence.
The words were choked with sobs that rocked her slight frame. Lucien lay there. A man who had ordered killings without blinking. A man who had created a criminal empire on the basis of blood and murder. A man who had died with nothing in his eyes but the hand of disappointment and the bitter taste of betrayal on his tongue.
And he didn't know how to handle a crying fourteen-year-old girl holding him like he was her whole world.
So he did what instinct — not the killer's instinct, something older than that and buried so deep within him that he'd forgotten it existed — told him to do.
He lifted his arm and put it around her. Gently. Carefully. As if he was holding something that terrified him to death of breaking.
" I'm not going anywhere," he said quietly.
Aria cried harder. Elena hugged both of them to her.
And Lucien Graves — The Black Emperor, the man who had believed in no one and loved nothing — sat alone in a tiny room within a world he did not comprehend, shaking with silent sobs and felt something inside his chest crack open. Not his ribs. Not his wounds. Something worse. Something warm.
Later — after Elena had made him drink every bloody drop of the broth, and Aria wouldn't leave his side despite Elena's insisting he sleep — Lucien lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
Aria slumbered in a chair next to him, head resting on the side of his bed, hands loosely entwined with his. She snored softly.
It was, of course, the most disarming sound he had ever heard.
He opened the system.
[ ABYSSAL SOVEREIGN SYSTEM ]
[ SOUL INTEGRATION: 41% ]
[ FULL BODY RECONSTRUCTION IN: 58 HOURS]
[ NEW HOST DETECTED — INITIAL SCAN COMPLETE ]
[ WOULD YOU LIKE TO VIEW YOUR STATUS? ]
[ Yes ]
[ STATUS — LUCIEN GRAVES ]
[ STATS ]
[ STR: 3 ]
[ AGI: 2 ]
[ INT:47 ]
[ VIT: 4 ]
[ CHA: 39 ]
[ LUCK: 11 ]
[ FEAR INDEX: 0 ]
[ RANK: UNAWAKENED ]
[ SKILLS: NONE ]
[ TITLES: NONE ]
[ SHADOW SOLDIERS: 0 ]
[ SYSTEM NOTE -Physical stats reflect current body state. INT/CHA are attributes carried in the soul from another life. There will be a full stat recalibration after body rework. ]
Lucien studied the numbers. His physical stats — poor fellow — had been little better than a corpse. But he had retained his Intelligence and Charisma from his old life.
The mind of a man who'd outfoxed every gangster, politician, and G-Man in New Verona. A man who could enter a room and own the place. His body was weak. But he had a mind that was a weapon the world had not seen.
Then he closed the status screen and peered at Aria's face, asleep. Peaceful. Trusting. Completely unguarded.
I had everything and no one in my old life.
I possess nothing in this life except...this.
He looked toward the window. Through the thin curtains, he could make out the vague shape of a cluster of rooftops — a small, poverty-stricken town barely hanging in there. And south of the town, on the horizon many miles away, faint and hard to see against the black night, a form.
Massive. Towering. A black silhouette that came up from the ground and got lost in the clouds as if it were an arrangement to hold up all of Heaven.
A Tower. Lucien's eyes narrowed. I do not know what this world is. I don't know the rules. I don't know who's at the top or what's inside those towers. He looked at Aria again.
Then on the door where Elena had vanished. But I know one thing. His fingers wrapped — just a tiny little bit — around Aria's grip.
No one will touch them. Not in this life. Not ever. Before I allow it to,
I'll bring this whole world to fucking ash".
His crimson eyes — new, strange, and faintly glowing in the darkness — reflected the distant silhouette of the Tower.
And if this world has a throne...
I'll take it.