Alen's small feet stepped over the muddy, stagnant earth of the Slum district. In his hand, he gripped a bundle of dull parchment containing dried roots and pain-relieving powder as if it were the most precious treasure in the empire. A faint, thin smile something rarely seen on the cold face of the former Emperor flickered for a fleeting moment.
"The dosage is low, the ingredients are trash," Alen muttered, his voice flat yet carrying a strange authority for a twelve-year-old. "But for a common human body, this should suffice to sustain a life for a few more weeks. At least until I find a way to purify the mana in this pathetic blood of mine."
He stared at his palms. In his previous life, with a flick of his wrist, he could have summoned rains of healing or crafted elixirs of immortality from the essence of stars. Now, he had to haggle with a senile old man for a few grams of low-grade herbs. "Utterly irritating," he hissed.
As he walked, the crowd cheering for Andreas the Savior still roared in the distance. Alen didn't even turn his head. To him, a hero parading on a white horse was nothing more than a peacock preening in a cage of apes. He cared nothing for the politics of this new world. His focus was singular: the dilapidated wooden shack at the end of the narrow alley.
However, as he drew closer to his home, the sharpened senses of Cyrus d'Asgard thawing within Alen's young body caught something wrong.
Silence.
Normally, he would hear Anna humming or his mother's heavy, labored cough. But this time, there was only the sound of the wind whistling through the cracks of the rotting wood. The front door was slightly ajar, hanging crookedly on a broken hinge.
Alen picked up his pace. As he crossed the threshold, a thick, metallic stench hit his nostrils. A smell he knew intimately from a thousand ancient battlefields.
Blood.
In the center of the cramped room, Alen froze. The grip on the medicine bundle loosened. The scene before him was a tableau of unimaginable tragedy. His mother lay on the cot with her throat slashed, her eyes wide and glassy, staring at the ceiling with the frozen remnants of terror.
And on the floor... Anna. His sister, the girl who was always a sunbeam in the dark, lay in a pool of her own crimson. Her body was a map of bruises, her clothes torn, and her hand was still outstretched toward her mother's bed.
Alen's world didn't collapse with a bang, but with a deathly, suffocating silence.
A few hours before the tragedy, while Alen was still at the apothecary, Anna sat in the corner of the house counting the copper coins she had managed to save. The clinking of the small metal discs was music to her ears a symbol of hope that today, they might eat a decent meal.
"One... two... ten..." Anna whispered with a wide, innocent grin.
Unbeknownst to her, behind the holes in the wooden wall, a pair of eyes reddened by alcohol and desperation were watching. It was Borne, a degenerate from the neighboring shack who had long since traded his humanity for a bottle of rotgut.
Borne heard the clinking. In the Slums, the sound of copper was an invitation to the devil. To him, Anna wasn't counting money; she was counting the reasons for Borne to kill.
After Alen left, Borne didn't come alone. He called two of his cronies, fellow dregs of society. They kicked the door in with brutal force.
"Give us the money, brat!" Borne roared, his face twisted in a feral snarl.
Startled, Anna immediately hid the coin pouch behind her back. "No! This is for Mother's medicine! Please, don't take this!"
"Medicine? Dead people don't need medicine!" one of them lunged forward.
Anna's resistance was both futile and incredibly brave. Even as she was beaten and thrown into the corner, she did not let go of the pouch. She screamed, trying to wake her frail mother. Her mother, with the last shred of her strength, tried to rise from the bed to protect her daughter, but a blade was swifter, piercing her throat before she could even make a sound.
"MOTHER!" Anna shrieked hysterically.
Greed had deafened the killers. Borne, enraged because Anna continued to fight and had bitten his hand, lost control. He drove his knife repeatedly into the girl's chest.
"Die! Just die!"
Once Anna stopped moving, they snatched the blood-stained coins and vanished into the darkness of the alleys, leaving two shattered lives behind for a few pieces of copper that wouldn't even buy a single bottle of fine wine in the city center.
Back in the present, Alen stood paralyzed. The medicine he had just bought fell to the floor, scattering next to Anna's cold, limp hand.
Cyrus d'Asgard, the conqueror who had witnessed millions of deaths, should have felt nothing. He had once eradicated entire races without a second thought. Yet, this small body named Alen possessed biological tethers he could not override. His heart hammered against his ribs until it ached, his lungs constricted, and hot tears began to stream down his cheeks.
However, if anyone were to look into his eyes, they would shudder in primal fear.
Alen's eyes showed no sorrow. They were hollow, black, and frigid like a void ready to swallow the light. His tears were merely a biological reaction of a child's tear glands, while his soul was freezing into a wrath that transcended human logic.
Outside, the sound of hooves approached. Andreas the Savior, curious about the mysterious boy who had ignored him earlier, had followed Alen into the depths of the Slums. He dismounted, frowning at the sight of the broken door.
"Hey kid, are you alri—"
The words died in Andreas's throat. The hero of the kingdom, the man who slew a dragon, felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The atmosphere inside the room was so heavy it felt as if gravity itself had doubled.
Andreas saw Alen kneeling between the two corpses. The boy was clutching Anna's stiff hand. Tears continued to pour down Alen's face, yet there was no sobbing. Only a haunting stillness.
"This... was this the work of bandits?" Andreas asked, his voice trembling as his hand instinctively went to the hilt of his sword. He was horrified—not just by the bodies, but by the aura radiating from Alen's back.
Alen did not turn around. When he spoke, his voice sounded like two voices layered over each other—the high pitch of a child and a primordial resonance from the depths of hell.
"A Savior... you say?" Alen whispered, his tone so flat it made Andreas take a step back.
Alen slowly stood up. Tears still wet his face, but he stared at Andreas with a look that made the hero feel like prey before an ancient predator.
"The world hasn't changed," Alen said, staring at his hands, which were stained with his sister's blood. "Humans remain disgusting creatures who kill for scraps of metal. And you... the worshipped hero... you saved nothing today."
Andreas froze. He saw the scattered medicine on the floor, the suffocating poverty, and a child whose soul seemed dead even though his body was breathing.
"Kid, I will find whoever did this. I promise you—"
"There is no need," Alen interrupted. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, the tears had stopped, leaving behind the true, icy gaze of Cyrus d'Asgard. "I will find them. And I will ensure that death becomes the most luxurious gift they will ever receive."