In my previous life, I loved three things:
Killing.Women.Blood.
The first destroys your soul. The second steals your heart. The third costs you your mind.
But I made a decision when I arrived in this world — one I didn't expect to make, and certainly didn't plan.
I decided to stop.
Not because I became a good person overnight. Not because some moral awakening found me in the dark. Nothing as clean or convenient as that.
It was my mother.
Before I could speak, before I could walk, before I could run — she was already teaching me. Not through lectures or rules or punishments. Through one sentence, said once, in the quiet way that people say things they have carried for a long time:
"Don't do to a girl what you wouldn't want done to me."
She said it once.
And it stayed.
I love her. The thought arrives with the same quiet certainty it always does — uncomplicated, unqualified, unlike almost everything else I feel. She is the only living thing that has ever loved me without wanting something in return.
I wonder how she is right now.
I hope she isn't worrying.
One month in the forest.
I've killed more white tigers and Fire Cats than I bothered to track. I stopped counting the fights somewhere in the middle — but I kept counting what mattered. Ten gems. That's all seventy tigers produced. The math is brutal and I respect it.
I am currently standing in a clearing with blood around my feet, holding a headless white tiger by what remains of its neck, the carcasses of several of its companions arranged around me in the specific geometry of a fight that went exactly the way I intended.
Level 24 now.
I came close to dying more than once. I don't dwell on it.
I drove my sword into the tiger's chest cavity and extracted the heart with my free hand.
"Absorption."
▶ New Skill Acquired via Absorption ◀
▶ Flash Speed — Learned ◀
「 Grants movement speed equivalent to a white tiger's full sprint. Duration: 4 minutes. Cooldown: 4 minutes. 」
I dropped the tiger and tried it immediately.
The speed arrived all at once — not a gradual acceleration but an instant translation from still to moving, the forest blurring at the edges of my vision, my feet finding purchase on roots and stones without conscious thought. Behind me, twenty white tigers matched my pace — not enemies, not threats. Tamed. Mine. Their massive bodies weaving between the ancient trunks with the fluid ease of things built for exactly this.
I feel like the wind.
One minute elapsed.
What if I add Qi to my legs?
I pushed it downward — felt it flow through my thighs and calves and into the ground with each stride — and my speed doubled instantaneously.
The forest became a blur. The ancient trunks compressed to nothing. The air hit my face with enough force to blur my vision —
A tree materialized from the darkness directly ahead.
No — wait — wait —
WAIT —
The impact was comprehensive and immediate and deeply humbling. The trunk didn't move. I did — backward, landing on the ground with the particular undignified thump of someone who has just learned an important lesson about momentum.
I need to learn how to stop.
I sat on the ground for a moment, blinking.
Then I started smiling.
Something emerged from between the trees ahead.
Large. Black. Moving with the unhurried, absolute confidence of a creature that has never once needed to consider whether it was the most dangerous thing in its environment.
I had been searching for it for weeks. Going progressively deeper into the forest, pushing past the territories I had already mapped, reading the specific signs — the way smaller beasts moved away from certain areas, the unusual silence in spaces that should have had sound.
A Night Wolf.
He was enormous in the way that makes the word feel inadequate — twice the height of any wolf I had previously encountered, his black fur dense and layered, absorbing the bioluminescent light rather than reflecting it so that he seemed to exist at the center of his own private darkness. His eyes were pale gold, wide-set and intelligent, carrying the specific quality of something that has led others for a very long time. Old scars traced white lines across his muzzle and shoulders — the record of a life spent fighting things that were also very dangerous.
Danger Domain registered something it rarely registers:
Genuine threat.
I activated Status:
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│ NIGHT WOLF — STATUS │
├─────────────────────────────────┤
│ Name : Night Wolf │
│ Level : 31 │
│ Role : Wolf Pack Leader │
│ Race : Beast │
├─────────────────────────────────┤
│ Skill : Lightning Strike │
└─────────────────────────────────┘
Level 31.
Wolf Pack Leader.
I had learned something important over this month of fighting — something no book stated explicitly but that experience had carved into me through repetition. There is a threshold every ten levels where the gap in power becomes qualitatively different rather than merely larger. A Level 30 beast doesn't just hit harder than a Level 20 — it operates in an entirely different register. The difference isn't a step. It's a cliff.
This wolf, at Level 31, could theoretically kill fifteen white tigers in favorable conditions.
I am Level 24.
I summoned Athena's Blade from the Inner Domain — felt the familiar weight settle into my hand, the inscriptions on the hilt warm against my palm — and channeled both Fire Burst and Qi simultaneously into the steel. The blade erupted into its layered manifestation: orange flame at the surface, black Aura Manifestation underneath, the two energies combining into something that cast shifting light across the dark space between us.
The Night Wolf watched this without moving.
His pale eyes tracked the blade, then came back to my face.
He's intelligent. The thought arrived with something adjacent to admiration. He's not reacting to the light or the heat — he's reading me. Deciding.
I looked back at him.
I feel the excitement building.
This is going to hurt.
I can't wait.
A memory arrived uninvited.
My first real fight.
I was young — barely into what I generously called my professional criminal career. Somewhere, a group of wealthy men had decided that watching people like me destroy each other was an appropriate use of an evening. The cage was iron, its bars dark with the accumulated evidence of previous entertainments, the air thick with the specific atmosphere of a place where violence is scheduled and ticketed and sold.
Across from me: a man built like something structural. Not just large — dense, the kind of body that takes years of specific punishment to produce. He looked at me with the flat professional assessment of someone who had done this many times and found nothing in my appearance to concern him.
The bell rang.
I moved immediately — not toward him but sideways, low, angling for the space beneath his reach. I got behind him and went for his neck.
Five seconds. Then his hands found me and my head found the iron of the cage.
The world went sideways. Blood filled my mouth. I was on the ground and he was above me and his hand found my throat and lifted.
I'm going to die in a cage for the entertainment of men I've never met.
No.
I moved my legs. His head was level with my feet. I drove both heels into his skull with everything I had — felt the grip on my throat waver, just slightly — dropped, put everything remaining into one strike below his center of mass, felt him fold.
Then I was on top of him.
I didn't stop until there was nothing left to stop.
Kill or be killed. The simplest rule. The only one that has never failed me across two lives.
I was ashamed of dying the way I died in my previous life. Taken from behind. Unaware. The embarrassed surprise of it. Not the dying itself — I had always known the dying was coming. But the manner of it.
That won't happen again.
The Night Wolf shifted his weight forward.
His pale eyes stayed on mine.
And before the first move of the fight could be made —
Something emerged from the trees behind him.
Unexpected guests.