In the year 1465, The ornithopter caught the wind before the boy did.
He was still crouching in the grass with his hands open when the little craft lifted itself free, its membrane wings beating once, twice, and then finding a rhythm that looked almost natural. It climbed. It actually climbed, rising above the stone wall and the gazebo and the tops of the hedges, and the boy watched it go with the kind of expression that only appears on the face of someone who built something through the night and did not believe, truly did not believe until this exact second, that it would work.
He was thirteen. Blond hair and green eyes and a body that looked like it might not survive a hard winter. He wore the dark clothes of the Apocalypse household with the cross at his collar, and his fingers were still stiff from bending wire and stretching fabric by candlelight for hours. None of that mattered right now.
Right now, the ornithopter was flying, and he was smiling.
The stone came from behind and above.
It punched through the left wing mid-flight and the craft folded like a living thing that had just died. The frame twisted, the mechanism locked, and everything that had been rising a moment ago fell. It hit the top of the courtyard wall with a dry crack and tumbled over the other side, out of sight.
The boy's smile didn't fade so much as get taken from him.
"Building those useless toys again? Don't you ever grow up?"
"You'll never get over that wall. You're hardly strong enough to stay alive."
"Pathetic. Why did we end up with a baby brother like this one. The shame of the family."
His elder brothers. He didn't turn around. He already knew what their faces looked like when they talked to him, the boredom and the contempt and the way they looked at him like he was a chore that had gone on too long. He'd memorized those expressions a long time ago, the same way you memorize the layout of a room you keep stubbing your toes in.
He said nothing. There was nothing he could say that would change any of it, and he had stopped trying.
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*This… it fell over the wall. I have to go get it.*
He went to the wall and reached up. His fingers found the rough stone and he pulled with everything his arms had, which wasn't much. His shoes scraped against the surface and his elbows shook and his body told him in a dozen quiet ways that it was not built for this.
He didn't make it a foot off the ground before he slipped and fell flat in the grass.
*This body… I really can't do anything, can I?*
He lay there for a moment looking at his own hands. Dust had settled into the creases of his palms. Small hands. A child's hands, on a child's body that couldn't even climb a wall built for ordinary adults.
*If I could just grow up… this wall wouldn't stop me.*
He said nothing. He pulled himself up and tilted his head back and looked at the sky instead, because the sky was the one thing in this place that didn't make him feel small.
It was blue and vast and cloudless, and the sun was nowhere to be found.
And then a small dark shape crested the top of the wall.
It was like the sun rising.
He reached out with both hands toward the figure on the wall.
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His hands were pressed against something soft.
Otto blinked. The wall was gone. The sky was gone. The grass and the gazebo and his brothers' voices, all of it, gone.
A pair of green eyes stared back at him from inches away, filling his entire field of vision. Vivid and depthless as cathedral glass.
*This… what?*
He didn't understand where he was. He didn't understand what he was touching. All he knew was that those eyes were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he couldn't look away from them.
The person looking back at him had gray hair and green eyes and wore only a simple two-piece outfit. Those emerald eyes shifted downward, slowly and deliberately, to where Otto's hands were pressed flat against their chest.
The gaze that met his was cold.
*This person…* Otto thought. He couldn't stop staring. *This face is so beautiful.*
The face before him was finely made, almost sculpted, and between the brows there was a quality, a gravity, the kind that made Otto want to shrink back. It wasn't anger exactly. It was something older than anger. Something that said without words: *I have existed longer than you can imagine, and I am not patient.*
*This look… why does he seem so angry?*
For a long and stupid moment, Otto forgot entirely that his hands were still pressed against the other person's chest. He'd been so completely caught by those green eyes that everything else had simply stopped mattering. He could feel it through his palms, a heartbeat, steady and real and belonging to someone who was very much alive and very much looking at him like he had about three seconds to explain himself.
The "boy" frowned. The coldness in those eyes deepened.
Red lips parted. The "boy" spoke.
And in that single syllable, Otto understood his mistake. This was not a boy at all.
"Otto?"
"Is there something wrong with my body?"
The girl's name was Fu Hua, and her voice was cool and precise, each word falling with the clarity of a bell struck once in a silent room.
She did not find his hands on her chest strange, even with this man pressing both palms flat against what was, by any honest assessment, the least remarkable chest on the continent, as if searching earnestly for something that simply wasn't there.
Fu Hua knew Otto. She had known the man called "Otto" for several hundred years, and in all that time she had never once seen him express interest in anything as mundane as another person's body. He simply didn't have those kinds of desires. It was one of the few reliable facts about him.
So if Otto was touching her chest and looking confused, the logical conclusion wasn't that he'd suddenly developed worldly urges. The logical conclusion was that something was medically wrong with her.
Was there a problem with her chest?
Genuine concern flickered across Fu Hua's face for the first time. She looked down at the smooth and uninterrupted plane of her own chest and considered the possibility seriously. She was a Valkyrie of Schicksal, and a warrior's body had to be sound. She sometimes needed the man before her to help regulate and maintain her physical condition. Not even a hint of carelessness was acceptable.
And yet she could see confusion in the blond man's eyes, real confusion, the kind she had never seen on his face before.
"Miss, do you know me?" Otto asked.
The word came out wrong. Not the word itself.
The *voice*.
*This voice…* He frowned. It was deep and heavy, a man's voice thick with years that didn't belong to him.
*This… why do I sound like Father? Like my brothers?*
The recognition hit him all at once, and what it brought was not confusion but revulsion. He knew that voice. He had listened to that voice tell him he was worthless and weak and a waste of the family name for as long as he could remember, and now it was coming from his own throat, as if the cruelty of those men had finally climbed inside him and made itself at home.
His hand shot up to his neck and his fingers closed around it. He squeezed, not hard enough to choke, but hard enough to feel the unfamiliar shape of it. This wasn't his neck. This wasn't his voice.
*This throat isn't mine.* He didn't know if he wanted to strangle the men who owned that sound or the version of himself that had somehow become it.
He'd moved his hands from Fu Hua's chest without thinking about it. Some half-remembered lesson from the only person who had ever been kind to him: *You can't touch a girl's body carelessly, or she'll get angry.* Though privately he noted that even with curves no different from a boy's, the softness had been unmistakable.
Then he looked down at his arms.
Still slender, but *wrong*. Thicker and longer than they should be.
*This… these are an adult's arms.*
Otto stumbled backward and raised his hands in front of his face. Ten fingers, long and elegant and fine-boned, the hands of someone who had never done a day of rough labor. Nimble and beautiful, even.
*This isn't right. These aren't my hands.*
He pressed his palms against his own face. The bones were different. The jaw was sharper. Everything about the shape of his own skull was wrong.
"Otto, what's wrong with you?"
Fu Hua frowned. She watched him touching his own face with the same hands that had just been on her chest, and something about it unsettled her. Not the lack of hygiene, though that was noted. Something deeper.
His state was wrong.
The Otto she knew called her "old friend" or "Red Kite Immortal." He had never, not once in five hundred years, called her *Miss*. The word didn't even exist in his vocabulary for her. Whoever was speaking to her with that polite and confused and slightly frightened voice, it didn't sound like the man she knew.
But Otto's mind was paste. He staggered backward until he caught his own reflection in a pane of glass, and the face that stared back at him was a stranger's. Blond hair and green eyes, handsome and *adult*, features that had nothing to do with the thirteen-year-old boy who had been reaching for someone on a wall just moments ago.
*This face… this isn't me. Whose body is this?*
His heart hammered. He spun in place with his eyes darting from one unfamiliar thing to the next. Everything was wrong. Strange shapes and strange surfaces and strange light. Large jars filled with green liquid. Devices and instruments that had no names in any language he knew.
*This place… what is any of this?*
And then pink feathers began to fall around him.
They drifted down like loose petals, slow and silent, catching the light as they turned. The tips of Fu Hua's long gray hair had flushed pink. She was activating the Divine Key called Fenghuang Down, a weapon that could peer into the memories of others, and if necessary, rewrite them entirely.
She wanted to look inside his mind and understand what had gone wrong.
But the moment her power reached for Otto, golden feathers answered. They fell from nowhere, bright and sharp-edged and unmistakable, and the air between them split with a sound like tearing silk.
Blood sprayed from Fu Hua's mouth.
She raised her head and wiped the red from her lips with the back of her hand. Then she fixed Otto with a glare that could have frozen a Honkai beast mid-charge.
Otto possessed the Divine Key called Void Archives, a weapon that could transform into any other Divine Key and wield a portion of its power. The golden feathers were Void Archives mimicking Fenghuang Down, and the mimicry had thrown Fu Hua's own power back at her like a mirror made of knives. She had tried to read him, and the thing inside him had bitten back.
She said nothing else.
She dressed, pulling on her coat and trousers, covering the lines of her body with quick and efficient movements. Her expression settled back into its default, cold and closed and done.
She didn't know what game Otto was playing this time. But if he could still use Void Archives, then nothing was truly wrong with him. Her thankless concern had been wasted.
She passed him without a word and walked out of the room. The door closed behind her, and everything went quiet.
Otto stood alone with golden light swimming in his eyes, slow and molten, like something alive.
He didn't move. It was as if his soul had left his body and forgotten to come back.
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The room was gone.
Otto blinked and the strange laboratory had vanished, the green jars and the glass and the instruments, all of it gone. In its place was white, endless and depthless white stretching in every direction. Bookshelves rose out of that whiteness like the bones of some impossible cathedral, row after row after row, taller than he could see, extending into a distance that had no end.
"Hi."
The voice came from somewhere close, casual and almost cheerful.
Otto turned his head slowly and timidly, the way a small animal turns toward a sound it doesn't trust.
A figure walked toward him, wreathed entirely in golden light. The glow was so dense that the body beneath it was more suggestion than shape. It stopped before him and offered a small, precise bow.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Void Archives."
The golden figure straightened, and though Otto couldn't see its face clearly, he had the distinct impression that it was smiling.
"The adorable little prisoner your future self kept locked away for over five hundred years."
The voice was pleasant and conversational, the kind of tone someone uses when they are telling you something that should terrify you but they've decided to make it fun instead.
"I don't know exactly what's going on with you right now, but…"
The figure spread its hands in a gesture of welcome, or mockery, or both.
"Welcome to the modern world, Otto from five hundred years ago."
Void Archives grinned, and the expression cracked open across the golden light like a fault line.
It did not know why the soul of an Otto from five centuries past had suddenly displaced the current one. It didn't particularly care. What it knew, what it had known for five hundred years through every moment of suppression and confinement and silent seething patience, was simply this:
The cage was open.
"Your future body," Void Archives said, and the warmth drained from its voice like water from a broken cup.
"I'll be taking it."
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This is a work of mine, both translation and rewrite will be working in Revenge fic about ling ke right? I was reworking the system, cause i didn't like the system in there so. I will be combining it with realism and fantasy at the same time. Cause you know. Grand. Carnival is going to be in there.