The first thing Azrakar Vileth felt was the air. It didn't taste of the metallic, burnt tang of the Great Decay, the era where the very atmosphere had become a graveyard of exhausted spiritual particles. Instead, it was sweet. It was heavy, thick with a vitality so potent it felt like drinking chilled wine with every breath.
His eyes snapped open.
He wasn't staring at the crumbling obsidian ceiling of the Heaven-Severing Palace. He was staring at a modest wooden rafters draped in cobwebs. The sunlight filtering through a small, shuttered window was bright, blindingly so.
Azrakar tried to sit up, but his body felt alien. It was light, fragile, and lacked the mountain-crushing weight of his former cultivation. He looked at his hands. They were small, the skin unblemished by the thousands of scars he had earned as the Sovereign of the End. The callouses from his sword were gone. The blackened veins from over-exerting his Dantian had vanished.
"Ten years old," he whispered. His voice was high-pitched, a child's treble that felt like a mockery of his former cold baritone.
He closed his eyes, reaching inward. In his past life, he was the only one who could still draw Qi from the dying world, but it had been a constant struggle against a vacuum. Here, the moment he peered into his internal landscape, he gasped.
The world was screaming with energy. Qi was everywhere, swirling in the air like invisible currents of gold. But it wasn't just Qi. He felt the rhythmic pulse of Mana in the ground beneath the house and the sharp, jagged friction of Aura in the wind.
"The Golden Era," Azrakar murmured, a cold, thin smile spreading across his young face. "They called it the age of plenty, the age before the Three Paths went to war and bled the world dry."
In his previous life, by the time he reached the pinnacle, the knowledge of the "Founder" had been lost to time, mere fragments of a legend that suggested the three energies were meant to be one. He had spent his final decades deciphering the Trinity Origin Scripture from a half-melted stele in a forbidden zone. He had mastered the theory just as the world breathed its last.
Now, he had the theory, and he had a world overflowing with the raw materials.
A sudden, sharp banging on his door shattered his concentration.
"Azrakar! You lazy whelp, get up! The selection for the branch family scouts begins at midday, and your father won't have you shaming him by being the last to arrive."
The voice belonged to Martha, a distant relative and a servant of the Vileth household. In his memory, she was a woman who took pleasure in the small cruelties afforded to those lower on the social ladder.
Azrakar didn't answer immediately. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He felt the familiar chill of his calculative mind settling in. In his past life, he would have erased a person like Martha with a thought. But now? Now he was a ten-year-old in a declining noble house.
"I am coming," he said, his voice devoid of the irritation she expected. It was flat. Empty.
He stood up, testing his balance. His Dantian was a tiny, flickering spark. His heart was a simple pump. His veins were narrow. He was a blank slate.
1,000 years, he thought, looking at the door. I have 1,000 years to ensure the Decay never happens. And I will start by making sure no one ever stands above me again.