Never wait for anyone to carry you.
Reach the summit yourself — and they will follow.
▶ Energy Shield — Learned ◀
「 A barrier constructed from concentrated Mana, manifested around the body. Duration: 2 minutes. Strength increases with Realm advancement. 」
I told her I intend to rule this world.
When did I start thinking that?
I don't know exactly. But the moment the words left my mouth, something shifted inside me — the particular feeling of a thought that has been living beneath the surface finally finding language. Not a new ambition. A recognized one.
In my previous life I never used words like rule. I used words like control and take and mine. But the principle was identical. I have never been able to tolerate being beneath anyone. Not a father who was supposed to protect me. Not a man who bought me with violence. Not a gang leader who thought ownership was a transaction.
I am free the way wind is free. I go where I choose. I take what I want. I answer to nothing.
The path to that freedom was built from bodies. I know that. I don't particularly regret it.
I remember an assassination.
A minister. High-ranking, politically connected, despised by the gang leader I was serving under at the time. The assignment was simple: remove his head. Literally — I had developed an irritating hobby in those years of collecting the heads of people I killed. A shelf above my bed. An aesthetic choice that most people found difficult to appreciate.
I went to the minister's home in the evening, cigarette lit before I entered, moving through the rooms with the unhurried ease of someone who has done this so many times that the body performs it without instruction from the mind. I knew he lived alone with his son. I knew the layout. I knew the exits.
What I didn't know was the photograph in the entry hall.
A woman. Black hair. Fine lines at the corners of her eyes. A black mourning band across the frame.
His wife. Dead.
Death is the only truth this world contains. Everything else — happiness, love, goodness, even evil — is a story people tell to make the truth bearable. I have always known this. I have built my entire existence on this understanding.
I sat on his sofa and finished my cigarette. The smoke moved in slow columns in the still air. The house was quiet in the particular way that houses become quiet when the person who made them a home is no longer in them.
Then I heard it.
From upstairs. From the room at the end of the corridor with the light still on.
A voice. The minister's voice — but not the voice of a man with enemies and political appointments and reasons to fear the dark. A different voice entirely. Softer. Slower. The voice of someone telling a story to a child who is almost asleep.
I sat down at the foot of the stairs and listened.
No one ever told me stories before sleep. Not once. I wanted to know what it felt like to receive one. I listened until the end — until the child's breathing changed and the minister went quiet and the light in the corridor stayed on because fathers sometimes leave lights on — and I felt
nothing.
Not grief. Not recognition. Not the softening I might have expected. Nothing.
I went home. I slept well.
There was a new head on the shelf behind me.
It was not the minister's.
Not because goodness found me — I was already at the bottom of something that doesn't have a floor, and there is no climbing back from the things I had done. It was simply that I liked the story. And the gang leader had always irritated me. So I decided.
Why am I asleep?
Am I still alive?
A voice, before I opened my eyes:
"Wake up. Are you planning to sleep forever?"
I opened my eyes.
Yama was standing over me. I was on the ground. The courtyard stones were cold against my back. My body had the specific quality of something that has been repaired in a hurry — functional, but with the faint residual ache of recent damage throughout.
"What happened?" I said, without particular inflection. "Why am I alive?"
I asked it the way you ask what time it is. Simple curiosity. No investment in either answer.
"Tell me first — who taught you the Energy Shield?"
"Did it actually activate?"
"Yes." Something shifted in her voice — not quite conceding the point, but acknowledging it. "But you would have died without my healing. I've saved your life several times now."
"And you've been the reason my life needed saving each of those times."
She looked at me.
"Who taught you that skill? It's rare — only the Demon King knows it, and he passed it to me directly."
"I watched you draw Mana into your hand and reshape it into a barrier," I said. "So I did the same thing."
"You learned it by watching me once?"
"Yes." I held her gaze. "Don't forget — I'm a Shapeshifter as well. Reshaping Mana is not an unfamiliar concept."
I thought the word:
▶ Skills — Mage Path ◀
The panel opened. I found the Spirit Shield — and from it, an arrow pointing to a second skill, obscured and locked. I focused on it.
A notification appeared beside the locked entry:
「 This skill becomes available at Level 100. 」
For the first time since I had encountered her, genuine shock crossed Yama's face.
Not the controlled, tactical expressions she wore as armor. Not the composed fury or the deliberate composure. Something unguarded — surprise moving across her features before she could intercept it — and in that unguarded moment her face was, I noticed with some objectivity, quite remarkable.
"Is there a skill that unlocks after this one?" I asked.
"You don't know about Skill Grades?"
"I don't know that term."
She was quiet for a moment. Then:
"Skills have grades as well as levels. The skill you just learned — Energy Shield — is a Rare skill of the Third Grade. There are six grades total. The skill you saw locked above it is Sixth Grade. Mythic. No one has ever learned it." She paused. "To even attempt it, you'd need to be at the Master Realm. This applies to both the Mage Path and the Warrior Path."
Skill Grade System:
「 Grade 1 — Common | Grade 2 — Uncommon | Grade 3 — Rare | Grade 4 — Epic | Grade 5 — Ancient | Grade 6 — Mythic 」
I listened to all of it.
And what I registered, beneath the information itself, was something about the person delivering it — the depth of what she carries around inside that composed exterior. The breadth of what she knows. She speaks about these things the way people speak about things they have spent years living inside.
There is considerably more to this girl than what she has chosen to show me.
When she finished, she left without ceremony.
I went to sleep.
The next twenty days passed in the rhythm she had designed:
Five hours in the library. Five hours of sword training — with the Cheater Sword, now mine, now quiet in its scabbard in the way that things are quiet when they've accepted a situation. Four hours of magic training with Yama, which consistently featured at least one attempt on my life that she would characterize as pedagogy. One hour of sleep.
Repeat.
My level reached 22.
I was sitting in the courtyard on the morning of the twentieth day, cross-legged, pulling my Cultivation back to center after training, when Yama approached.
She stopped in front of me and looked down with an expression that contained, buried beneath its usual composure, something that might have been anticipation.
"I'm going to teach you the first skill I promised you."