Vastarael remembered war as a horizon that never stopped burning.
It was not the clean kind people liked to imagine from histories and banners. Mud swallowed feet and corpses. Smoke turned daylight ugly. Bodies collapsed in places where they would never again be whole. That was the first truth war taught him.
"It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it."
The quote that had stayed with him came from General Robert E. Lee after the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 during the Seventh Iteration. He remembered reading this story in a history website when he was bored of studying. Miraculously, he managed to find the exact scene of that war in the Mortal Anchor where he watched it from afar.
When the Confederate army had inflicted horrific losses on the Union attackers from strong defensive positions. Lee's remark was a reaction to the scale of the slaughter: war had to remain terrible, because if it became pleasant or noble in people's minds, they would begin to love it for the wrong reasons. That is the plain meaning behind the line. War's ugliness was the only thing that could keep beings from worshiping it.
Back in his first life, Vastarael had understood that.
He had been an academic genius then. He understood logistics, attrition, morale and survival. He knew that every war was less about banners and speeches than about how much pain a civilization could keep absorbing before it broke. So when he read and heard Lee's words, he did not hear poetry.
And then he was thrown into immortal war.vThat was where intellect stopped being enough.
Immortal wars were not made to kill regular bodies. Gunpowder weapons would have been laughably inadequate. Pistols, rifles, tanks, shellfire, crude modern artillery, all of it would have been noise against immortals unless the ammunition itself was specially prepared with anti-regenerative principles or divine killing properties. Plain metal and explosive force were not enough. An immortal could be riddled with bullets, torn apart by shrapnel, buried under rubble, burned until the flesh peeled off the bone and still come back if their soul remained intact. So the wars evolved into something older, crueler and far more... intimate.
Divine Weapons, blades, binding fields, soul piercing weapons, exhaustion tactics, curse-laced weaponry and battlefield systems were designed not just to wound, but to trap, drain and grind. The goal was not a clean death. It was prolonged destruction. In wars like that, victory belonged to whoever could make the enemy beg for an ending they were denied.
Vastarael learned all of that the hard way. The moment the Immortal Anchor took him, the battlefield swallowed him whole.
He was simply dropped into the middle of the war like a body thrown into a furnace. One moment he was somewhere else with his daughters and the next the air was screaming, the ground was shaking under stampeding immortals and the sky was black with smoke and stained light. Then the Primal Force of Time locked onto him.
Everything important went dark. Body Reconstruction was gone. His two Pinnacle Tethers were sealed. His Base Tethers were all locked. His Divinities were inaccessible. His Inventory was unreachable. Calimostria could not be summoned. He couldn't use his Runes or Soul Energy. His Seventh Enlightenment strength was gone. He was just a regular First Enlightenment Divine with no power or strength.
Only the Mystic Eyes of Awareness remained. That was all.
That was not enough to dominate a battlefield. It was not enough to win a duel. It was also not enough to escape what had become his prison.
The Primal Force of Time would not let him leave. Every time he tried to retreat, every time he was thrown back by impact or instinct or sheer desperation, the force of the realm bent him back toward the front. Not away from the war. Not beyond it. Back into it. As if the battlefield itself had decided he belonged there and time had signed the verdict.
So Vastarael fought as a regular immortal. No weaker than the others, yes, but no stronger either. Which meant he suffered like the rest.
The first year was the worst kind of education.
He learned what a battlefield smelled like after thousands of immortal clashes: blood dried on broken stone, burned flesh, wet earth, old metal and the sour reek of bodies that had been shattered so many times they no longer looked human or divine. He learned what it meant to wake under a corpse pile and realize the weight above him was not dead weight but living weight, twitching weight, the kind that might wake with a blade already inside you.
He was skewered through the side and left hanging on a pike for hours while the line kept moving around him. He was crushed beneath falling siege fragments, ribs folding inward like paper, only for the force of Time to keep him pinned until the next surge of bodies dragged him free. He had his left arm split open to the bone by a cleaving weapon that did not merely cut flesh but kept the nerves awake after the cut, so the pain lingered. He was trampled in the mud, kicked, dragged and struck by enemies who knew exactly how to hurt someone who could not die. Every wound was meant to delay, to humiliate and to exhaust. Every recovery was partial because his true reconstruction was locked away from him.
The Mystic Eyes of Awareness became his only mercy and his cruelest burden.
They let him see too much.
He saw angles of attack before they came. He saw the fractures in enemy formations. He saw lies in the movement of bodies, the hesitation before a strike or the tiny betrayals of fear in a veteran immortal's stance. But awareness did not stop the blade. It only made the blade arrive in exquisite detail. He would know exactly how the hit would land, exactly where it would break him, exactly how long it would take the pain to spread and then he would still take the blow because there was nowhere to go. Knowing did not save him. It only made every injury fully real.
That was just the first year. The second year taught him monotony.
The same screams. The same shattered ground. The same desperate regrouping under blood-red light. The same medical pits where immortals were stitched together badly and shoved back out because there were never enough hands and never enough time. The same commanders barking orders over and over because everyone kept dying badly enough to need replacing, even if "replacement" in an immortal war meant hauling half-broken survivors back into the line before the enemy finished them off. Vastarael stopped counting the days because time itself had become an insult.
His body became a ledger of damage. Broken fingers that healed crooked because he could not fully reconstruct them. A knee that would buckle after long marches. Scars layered over scars until old wounds could no longer be distinguished from new ones. A shoulder socket that ground like sand because the joint had never truly recovered. He grew used to waking already bleeding. He grew used to the taste of iron in the back of his throat. He grew used to standing when he should have collapsed because collapse invited being crushed, and being crushed on a battlefield like that only meant getting trampled again.
The third and fourth years were where the mind started to fray. Not because he was afraid of killing. He was not.
Vastarael had never been sentimental about blood. He had killed before the anchor and he killed there too when he had to. That was not the torment. The torment was being denied all the things that made endurance possible with no safe retreat, restoration, private space or certainty that sleep would remain sleep. Sometimes he would lie down for a minute in a crater and wake up because the crater had become a slaughter pit and someone had already jammed a blade through his side while he was unconscious. Sometimes he would black out standing and come to with ash in his mouth and someone else's arm under his boot. Sometimes the war simply kept going around him while he was half-dead in the mud and he had to watch the bodies moving through his field of vision as if he were already part of the landscape.
The battlefield taught him a new kind of helplessness.
Every morning, if morning still meant anything there, he had to stand up and continue. Every night, if night still meant anything, he had to keep his awareness sharp because sleep was a gamble and the enemy never stopped. There were days when he wanted nothing more than to stop moving and let the war claim him in whatever form it wanted, but the Primal Force of Time would not allow release. It forced him back into position, back into the line and into the machine of endless conflict. Even attempts to leave the battlefield curdled into failure. He would run, stagger, crawl and still find himself dragged back by forces he could not see, as though the realm itself had hands at his back.
By the fifth year, he had stopped expecting relief. That was when the war began to change him in subtler ways.
He no longer flinched at the first cry of a dying immortal. He no longer wasted pity on people who would be back in a few hours anyway, if only as a different arrangement of agony. He no longer celebrated victory because every victory merely rearranged the pain. He learned to eat quickly, sleep shallowly and listen for the sound that meant a charge was coming from behind the smoke. He learned which medics were competent and which were just trying not to die. He learned which commanders spent soldiers like coins and which ones still believed a battle had a shape that could be controlled.
He also learned that immortality made horror patient. A mortal war could end with massacre but an immortal war could continue that massacre for decades.
Sometimes the enemy did not need to kill you. Sometimes they only needed to maim you until the rest of your unit passed you by, then leave you lying in the dirt long enough for the cold to set in and the flies to arrive. Sometimes they broke your legs and waited. Sometimes they blinded you and let you hear the battle carry on around you until your nerves become your prison. Sometimes they would not finish the job because finishing was too merciful.
The sixth through eighth years were a blur of weather, blood and deprivation. Rain turned battlefields into trenches of filth. Cold made old wounds scream. Heat made armor burn against skin and made every breath taste like ash. He had no proper inventory to draw from, no divine provisions and no easy replenishment. Hunger became a constant companion. He ate whatever the war gave him, often little more than stale rations, burned roots or whatever could be scavenged from broken supply lines. Rest was snatched in fragments. A minute here. Ten there. Then up again because the line was breaking and the line always broke.
Sometimes he wondered whether this was what prisons felt like when they were made by gods. And still, he fought not because he believed the war meant anything glorious or because he enjoyed it. There was no other option.
The ninth year nearly killed his sanity.
Everything began to feel cyclical. The same openings in the terrain. The same blood-patterns. The same evasions. The same battlefield prayers shouted by immortals who had long ago stopped believing in them but still needed the sound of words to keep moving. Vastarael would catch himself anticipating injuries before they happened. He had become so aware of the battlefield that his awareness itself was a wound. He could read the war in the smallest details: a shift in dust, a pause in breath, the angle of a spearhead or the stiffness of a soldier's shoulders before a charge. It kept him alive. It also kept him trapped in a permanent state of alert, never truly resting, never truly safe.
That was the real torture.
He had become the sort of immortal the battlefield respected only by necessity: one who kept returning, one who kept moving who had learned that endurance could be a form of defiance. But there was nothing noble about what had been done to him. The Immortal Anchor had stripped away everything that made power elegant and left only the ugly core of persistence. He was not a king there or a hero wrapped in myth. He was a man trapped in endless war, surviving because the realm had not yet found a way to erase him completely.