Why are my eyes closed...?
Darkness. Complete and total.
My hands are bound — I can feel the restraints biting into my wrists — and my body is hollowed out. Not tired. Empty. Like something has reached inside me and unplugged everything at once. The Mana won't respond. The QI won't respond. My muscles feel like they belong to someone else.
What is happening to me? Where am I?
I tried to move.
My shoulder detonated with pain.
"Don't move. You'll ruin the effect of the medicine — and it costs considerably more than you're worth, you idiot."
A girl's voice. Sharp. Carrying the particular brand of authority that belongs to people who are used to being obeyed.
I went very still — not from pain, but because my mind had already started working.
She's treating me. She went out of her way to treat me. That means she needs me alive.
Interesting.
"Who are you?"
"That's irrelevant. What matters is — how did you get in here?"
"I ask the questions," I said. "Not you."
A beat of silence.
"Arrogant. Though I'd argue your current situation makes arrogance a poor choice."
"Feel free to argue it."
"I could kill you right now."
Something cold and thin traced a line across my throat. A blade — drawn slow and deliberate, just deep enough to open the skin. A warning written in blood.
I felt the warmth of it running down my neck.
And I started laughing.
Not a performance. Not a tactic. Just the genuine, helpless laughter of someone who finds the situation genuinely funny.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because you're not going to kill me," I said, when I recovered enough to speak. "You put medicine on my shoulder — medicine you said costs more than I do. You bound my hands instead of my throat. You kept me breathing." I paused. "You want something from me. Which means that knife is decoration."
Silence.
Then, quieter:
"...Smart."
"Save the compliments. What do you want?"
Something struck the back of my head with considerable force.
Darkness again.
When I surfaced the second time, I realized I had no clothes on.
I lay very still for a moment, processing this information with the calm of someone taking inventory after a disaster.
Is she planning to assault me? Did I somehow fall into the hands of a depraved girl?
"What exactly are you doing to me? I'm still a child, you know."
"Don't try that with me." Her voice came from somewhere nearby — close, focused, occupied with something. "Children don't do what you did in that forest."
She's perceptive.
"Fine," I said. "Then tell me what you want. And explain the restraints — because I'll point out that I have very little reason to cooperate with someone who keeps hitting me and stealing my clothes."
"I'm not afraid of you."
"I didn't say you were. I said explain."
"I need you still. The medicine is delicate. You moving around would ruin it — and I didn't drag you all the way here to watch my work collapse because you can't sit quietly."
Her voice was young. Genuinely young — close to my age, perhaps. But the way she spoke carried something older inside it. The cadence of someone who has spent years making decisions and living with the consequences.
I know that cadence. I invented it.
Before I could say anything else, something struck me from behind and I dropped —
Into water.
Scalding water.
The heat hit every nerve at once. I didn't make a dignified sound. I made a very loud, very sincere sound of pure agony.
"YOU — what is WRONG with you, you daughter of a—"
"Stop screaming and feel the energy around you."
"Come CLOSER and I'll show you some energy—"
"Feel it. Or I'll leave you in there."
Something in her voice shifted — not louder, but heavier. A pressure that had nothing to do with volume. An aura that landed on my chest like a physical weight and pressed the words back down my throat.
I went silent. Involuntarily.
She's strong. Whatever she is — she is genuinely, seriously strong.
I stayed furious. But I also, because I am not an idiot, did what she said.
I reached outward with the barest thread of awareness I still had access to — and —
...What.
It was everywhere.
Saturating the water, the air, the stone beneath it — Qi and Mana woven together so densely that the space felt alive with it. Not ambient energy. Concentrated energy. As though someone had been filling this place for a very long time.
"Absorb it. Now."
I pulled.
The heat vanished. Not gradually — immediately, completely — the scalding temperature rushing inward, through my skin, through my chest, gathering at the center of my sternum like water finding a drain. The marking on my chest blazed gold for a brief, searing moment.
Then:
"Level Up.""Level Up."
"Absorption — learned."
The description materialized before me — clean and precise as always:
You may draw energy from your surrounding environment. At higher levels, you may absorb the abilities of creatures you have killed.
I read it twice.
At higher levels, you may absorb the abilities of creatures you have killed.
I filed that away in the part of my mind where I keep things that will matter later.
Then:
"Healing — learned. Passive ability."You may regenerate minor wounds automatically. At higher levels, regeneration extends to severe injuries.
The pain in my shoulder — which had been a constant, grinding presence since the white tiger's claws found it — simply stopped. Like a candle being blown out. The torn muscle knit itself back together with a warmth that was almost pleasant, and the absence of pain after so many hours of it was disorienting in its own way.
"You see?" she said. "You're completely healed. All of that — because you decided to make things difficult."
"And if my hands weren't bound," I said pleasantly, "I'd have shown you a much more interesting time before killing you. Hahaha."
She healed me. She put genuine effort and expensive resources into keeping me alive.
But I don't allow threats. Not from anyone. Not ever.
That is a principle I carried across death itself, and I have no intention of abandoning it now.
A pause.
Then — the restraints fell away.
I felt the shift immediately. The pressure at my wrists gone. My hands free. My eyes no longer covered.
She released me.
She actually released me.
I opened my eyes — and I understood immediately that I had walked into something.
She was standing in front of me, arms loosely at her sides, wearing an expression of complete and total composure. Beautiful in the specific way that dangerous things sometimes are — the kind of beauty that exists alongside something that could kill you, so you never quite enjoy it cleanly.
Red hair. Not the dull red of rust or autumn leaves but vivid, burning red — the color of fire at its most honest. Two black horns curved from her head, elegant and dark as obsidian. Her eyes were yellow — the exact amber-gold of a cat's eyes at night, with the same vertical pupil, watching me with an expression that contained, beneath the composure, something that might have been amusement.
A long black tail moved slowly behind her.
And she was smiling.
"Go ahead then," she said softly. "Kill me."
I looked at her for a long moment.
Then I thought the word — not because I doubted what I was seeing, but because something about her had been bothering me since the first sound of her voice. A familiarity I couldn't locate. The feeling of recognizing something you have no memory of knowing.
Like a song you've never learned the words to. But you know the melody anyway.
"Status."
Name: YamaTitle: The KillerRace: DemonLevel: 60Occupation: Rebel Daughter of the Demon KingSpecialization: MageAbilities: Dragon of FireFeelings toward you: Intense fury.
The panel dissolved.
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
Level 60.
Daughter of the Demon King.
Dragon of Fire.
I held her gaze for a long moment — long enough that most people would have looked away — and said absolutely nothing.
Because for the first time in either of my lives, I found myself needing a second to think before I spoke.
...Damn.