Prologue – The Death of Kenjaku
The battlefield reeked of blood and smoke. Ruins groaned under the weight of the fallen, the air thick with cursed energy dense enough to choke the strongest sorcerers.
Kenjaku knelt among the devastation, his body lacerated, every inch bruised and torn. Centuries of planning had led him here, yet his life was slipping away. Still, his lips curved into a faint, sardonic smile.
"Centuries," he murmured, voice raspy with blood, "and you still think you can kill me."
With what strength remained, he traced sigils in the air, black tendrils of cursed energy spiraling outward. This was his final ritual, his ultimate failsafe.
A surge of energy tore through him, pulling at his consciousness. But something was wrong. The cursed energy that should have anchored him wavered. There was a foreign presence, alien and pulsing, colliding with his essence. Not a sorcerer's soul, not a curse he recognized—it was something new.
"No… this isn't… cursed energy," he hissed. "This isn't my world!"
The void opened and swallowed him. His consciousness stretched, twisted, and collided with the foreign soul. Two beings. One body. One will.
The stranger screamed—not with rage, but with confusion and terror. Kenjaku's consciousness clung to it like a parasite of purpose.
"If you take my name," he whispered into the void, "then take my will. Continue the experiment. Survive where I cannot."
Light enveloped him. Weightless, boundless, nothing at all, he drifted through a void unfamiliar and strange. Cursed energy vanished, replaced by something called chakra, humming through the air and recoiling at his presence.
A whisper echoed in his fractured mind:
> Kenjaku…
Not the man he had been. Not the original. But the name he would carry in this world, the vessel he would use to navigate it.
The world shifted around him, raining down fragments of war, blood, and destiny. A fragile human body awaited.
Then I adapt. Then I evolve.
And with that, the soul of a human and the remnants of an ancient curse began their first steps into a world that rejected them, a world unprepared for Kenjaku.