He woke to the sound of children screaming.
For a single blind heartbeat, he thought it was then again.
Flames. Steel. That sword.
His body jerked up. Instead of firelight he found stone. A low ceiling of black rock pressed down over rows of wooden pallets. The air was damp, thick with rust and old sweat. Somewhere water was dripping, slow and steady, like a patient executioner.
His lungs dragged in a breath that tasted of mold and iron.
Not battlefield smoke. Not burning flesh.
…I'm alive.
The thought came with a weight that made his fingers tremble. He stared at his own hands. Thin. Small. Scarless. The fingers of a seven-year-old boy.
Memories crashed in behind that realization, a tide breaking through a rotten dam.
The clan burning.
Tunnels caving in.
Children crying under falling stone.
The traitor's face twisted with something between fear and relief.
A long blade of cold white steel cutting through smoke.
The Swordsman's silhouette, cloak like a strip of night torn from the sky.
Blood spraying up in a red arc as that sword pierced his chest.
He felt again the burning cold of it inside him.
His lungs seized. His heart skipped. His fingers clawed at his ribs before he could stop them.
"Night terror again?"
The voice came from the pallet to his right. Thin, sleepy, irritated. A boy's voice, a little older than his own body.
He turned his head.
A narrow face, shaved head, dark eyes used to darkness. He knew that face. Knew it older, harder, with a jagged scar crossing the left eyebrow. Knew how that older version had died, back pressed to a collapsing wall, laughing even as poison ate his lungs.
"Jin," he whispered.
The boy frowned. "Of course it's me. Who else would sleep next to you, rat?"
His tone was sharp, but there was a familiar warmth in it. The same warmth that had once carried him half unconscious through the tunnels, shoulders shaking with strain. The same warmth that had gone still under fallen rock.
He swallowed. His throat felt too tight.
He's alive. He's… still here.
"How long until the gong?" he asked.
Jin snorted. "You woke the moment before it. Like always. You're worse than the crows."
As if the world obeyed the boy's complaint, a deep, metallic boom rolled through the cavern. The old bronze gong at the entrance shuddered the air, followed by the distant bark of an adult voice.
"UP! ORPHANS TO THE BLOOD PITS! MOVE!"
The words slammed into him like a hammer.
Blood Pits.
Memories rose again. Not of this life.
Children screaming as they were lowered into red-brown pools that reeked of metal and rot. Poisoned blood creeping into pores. Bodies convulsing under the sting of mixed venoms. Those who thrashed too hard drowned. Those who thrashed too little never woke at all.
In his first life, he had gone into those pits as just another child. Frightened, angry, too small to understand anything but hunger and fear. He had survived through stubbornness and Jin's hand on his back, pushing him up whenever he began to sink.
He still remembered carrying Jin's body back out when the other boy did not move.
His stomach turned over.
Not this time.
He swung his legs off the pallet. The floor was cold stone under his bare feet. Around them, the other orphans were already moving - thin shapes in ragged tunics, coughing, grumbling, shoving each other awake.
Thirty of them.
He counted without looking directly. The number came from memory as much as sight. Thirty children had lined up at the cavern mouth for the pits in his last life. Seventeen had walked back out.
The most talented among them, a girl with quick hands and a quicker smile, had not. He remembered white eyes staring at the cavern ceiling as foam bubbled at her lips.
"Rat?"
Jin's voice again, closer. He realized he had frozen halfway to standing. His hands were clenched into fists so tight his nails dug crescents into his palms.
"I'm fine," he said.
The lie came easily, worn smooth from years he hadn't yet lived in this body. He relaxed his hands, flexed them once, and forced his breathing to steady.
I died. I remember dying. I remember everything that mattered.
He remembered the traitor. The way the man had stood near the Patriarch's hall entrance, shoulders too still in the chaos, gaze flicking not to falling rock or screaming children but to the Swordsman cutting through the clan like harvest.
He remembered the traitor's name.
Elder Huo, Ash Stream.
He remembered chasing him later, in tunnels slick with blood, blade numb in his hand as his own ribs ground against one another. Huo's desperation, the way he screamed that they would all die anyway, that he had no choice. The Patriarch's roar. The Swordsman's sword descending between them, cutting the argument and Elder Huo's body both in one smooth strike.
The righteous never learned that part. In their records, the Blood Shadow Clan had simply been "purged."
He grit his teeth until his jaw hurt.
I know who betrayed us. I know who killed us. I know how we broke. And I'm back before any of it happened.
He would not waste that.
"Move, worms!"
The cavern entrance filled with the silhouette of a man. A torch in his hand painted the rough-hewn rock in sweaty orange. His shadow stretched long across the floor, slicing through the orphans.
Instructor Kuan. Shadow Stream.
He remembered him too. Remembered the man's foot slamming into his ribs when he faltered in training. Remembered the rare, almost invisible nod when he landed a strike correctly years later.
Kuan's gaze swept the dorm. It paused on him for half a heartbeat longer than on the others. Not because of any secret. Because in his previous life he had often been one of the last to move.
Not now.
He stepped forward, back straight, eyes lowered the appropriate amount. Not too low -deference, not submission. Demonic clans did not raise dogs. They raised blades. Dull blades were thrown away.
Kuan grunted, then turned. "Form up."
The orphans spilled out into the tunnel, bare feet slapping stone. Cold air crawled up from deeper passages, carrying the smell of damp earth and something metallic underneath.
Jin fell into step beside him. His shoulder brushed his, a light, familiar pressure.
"You're too calm," Jin muttered under his breath, low enough that only someone expecting it would hear. "Even for you. The Blood Pits, rat. You remember yesterday, don't you?"
Yesterday.
In this body, yesterday had been nothing special. Running drills in the Shadow Arena. Scrubbing dried blood from stone. Watching older disciples practice bone-tempering exercises with barely-hidden envy.
In his memory, "yesterday" blurred with a dozen similar days. All of them leading toward the pits.
"It's not my first nightmare," he said. "The pits won't kill me."
He kept his eyes forward, tone flat. But inside, a bitter laugh echoed.
They had killed him. Just not the first time he stepped into them.
Voices filtered from other tunnels as they passed intersection after intersection. Older disciples shouting. The scrape of wood over stone. The distant ring of training weapons.
Blood-Shadow Hollow lived as it always had, carved deep into the poisoned mountain, hidden from righteous eyes by layers of fog and toxic forest. Above them the Poisoned Ridge was waking as well - beasts slithering through thornbush, venom insects unfolding legs, herbs seeping their poisons into the soil.
He remembered the surface. The taste of sour wind. The sting of poison thorns across his forearms as he pushed through undergrowth. Years away for this body.
Not years for me.
They emerged into a wider cavern where torches burned in iron brackets, smoke coiling up toward cracks overhead. The Blood Pits lay ahead - four circular basins carved into the stone floor, their rims stained a deep rust color that no amount of scrubbing could fully erase.
The smell hit first.
Old blood.
New blood.
Rot.
Even with his memories, even knowing exactly what waited, his stomach clenched. The body remembered its own fear.
Children were already lined up along the nearest wall, barefoot and silent. Thirty of them total now, including his dorm. Faces pale in torchlight. Some tried to stand straight. Others shook openly.
Above them, on a stone ledge, an Elder watched.
Elder Lin of Bone Stream. The Bone Artist. A slight woman with hair like dry straw and eyes that never blinked enough. Her hands were wrapped in thin strips of cloth stained dark at the fingertips.
In his previous life she had broken nearly every bone in his body twice. The second time had given him the strength to survive the war for a few more months.
"Today," she said, voice carrying smoothly over the children, "you begin to earn the blood you drink and the food you steal from this mountain."
Her gaze swept them, weight like a physical thing. "The Poisoned Ridge does not suffer the weak. Neither do we."
He felt Jin stiffen beside him. The boy's hands balled into fists at his sides. His breath had gone shallow.
He nudged Jin's wrist with his fingers. Just once. A silent reminder of a trick he had only learned years later.
"Standing before you," Elder Lin continued, "are thirty orphans. Unmarked. Unproven. Worthless."
The words were ritual. They dug into him anyway.
"By dusk," she said, "some of you will still be worthless. Some will be dead. The rest will have taken the first step toward becoming useful."
A few children made choked sounds. One at the far end couldn't stop his knees from shaking.
In his first life, he hadn't known what was coming. Today he did.
Use it. Use everything.
A movement near the back caught his eye. A tall figure slipping in through a side passage, flanked by two Blood Generals. The Patriarch?
No. Broad shoulders, but not broad enough. Hair tied back in a rough knot. Scar across the jaw.
Blood General Qiao, Fang Stream.
One day Qiao would die on a battlefield, chest crushed by a righteous hammer technique. For now, his presence meant something else.
The clan was taking this batch seriously.
"Strip," Elder Lin said.
Tunics hit the floor in uneven waves of cloth. Thirty thin chests exposed to cavern chill. Ribs like cage bars. Scars and bruises already painting some of the bodies, older than seven.
He tugged his own tunic over his head. The air bit at his skin. He forced his shoulders not to hunch.
A servant moved down the line with a clay jar. From it came a thick, black paste that smelled of herbs and old smoke. Poison mixture. Weak enough not to kill by touch, strong enough to open pores and soften skin for what came next.
When it reached him, he stepped forward willingly. The servant's eyes flicked to his face, surprised at the lack of flinch. In his last life he had tried to recoil and gotten a cuff to the head for it.
Cold slickness smeared across his chest, arms, back. It tingled, then burned, as the poison began to creep into his skin. Around him, children hissed or bit back whimpers.
Jin muttered curses under his breath in the rough slang of the Ash Stream servants. His teeth were clenched so hard the muscles stood out along his jaw.
The burning would distract them, he knew. Make their breaths shallow. Make panic grow faster in the pits.
He closed his eyes briefly and let the pain come. Not rejecting it. Not embracing it. Just…tracking it.
Pain is memory.
Emotion is fuel.
Those principles had not yet been put into words in this world. They would be, one day, in techniques built on his bones.
For now he simply counted his breaths and watched how the burn moved across his skin. The more he could map it, the less it would rule him.
"Step," Elder Lin said.
They moved forward in groups of five toward the first pit. Torchlight wobbled on the surface of the liquid inside. Dark. Thick. Somewhere between water and sludge. Bubbles rose lazily where venoms mingled.
In his first life he had nearly thrown up at the sight. Today his stomach was already empty.
"Remember," Elder Lin said conversationally, as if they were discussing weather, "if you flail, you drown. If you lie still, you suffocate. If you breathe too shallowly, the poisons do nothing and you remain useless."
"What if we're just weak, Elder?" someone whispered at the far end.
She smiled. It did not touch her eyes. "Then the mountain decides your worth faster than I do."
The first five climbed the crude stone steps and lowered themselves into the blood. The liquid lapped at their knees, then thighs, then bellies. Their faces twisted as the full burn hit.
Younger him had gone in the third group.
He stepped up when the second group was called instead.
Jin hissed, "Rat, what are you..."
"If you wait, the mixture will be weaker," he murmured back, not moving his lips. "Weaker mix means longer soak. Longer soak means more time for mistakes."
Jin blinked. "Since when do you think like that?"
Since I died.
He didn't answer. Instead he met Elder Lin's gaze as he stepped toward the pit. The woman's eyes narrowed slightly.
Let her see. Let them all see. A demonic clan valued boldness as much as obedience. And he needed attention - not so much he stood out as a freak, but enough that someone would remember him when he needed it.
His group of five reached the rim. The smell was stronger here, heavy and wet. The liquid inside was not pure blood. It was blood mixed with beast ichor, venom, herbs, and things he preferred not to name.
"Down," Lin said.
He put a foot in.
Heat knifed up his leg. Not physical heat. The burning rush of compounds forcing their way under his skin, trying to unmake what his body thought it was.
He exhaled. In. Out. Slow.
He lowered himself further.
Waist. Chest. The liquid clung like oil, heavy and suffocating. When it reached his ribs it stole his breath for a moment. He let that panic wash through and past him, like a wave hitting rock and sliding away.
Beside him, Jin gasped, hands snapping out to grasp the pit's edge.
"Hands off the rim," Elder Lin snapped. "Or I cut them off. All of them. Now."
Jin's fingers jerked back as if burned. He swayed. For a moment, he was in danger of tipping forward and going under.
In his last life, this was the moment Jin had slipped and all but disappeared. It had taken three frantic grabs from him to keep the other boy's head above the surface. That effort had drained his own strength enough that he'd spent the rest of the soak half-drowned.
Then and there, he had barely understood why it had nearly killed him.
Now he did.
He shifted, setting his feet wider apart, sinking his knees slightly to anchor his stance. The thick liquid swirled around his waist.
"Jin," he said softly. "Breathe. Slow. Focus on the burn in your feet, not your chest. The more you fight, the worse it gets."
"How?!" Jin's eyes rolled toward him, wild. "How do you know..."
"Because if you pass out, I'll have to drag you up by the ears," he said. "That sounds tiring."
A strangled laugh tore out of Jin. Just enough to break the worst of the panic.
Lin's gaze flicked to them. He dropped his eyes at once, showing the appropriate fear. She liked boldness, not defiance.
"Submerge!" she called.
He filled his lungs. Not to bursting - that only fed the feeling of drowning when the chest compressed. Just enough.
Then he bent his knees and let the blood close over his head.
The world went red and muffled. The burn turned to fire. It slid into his ears, his nostrils, his eyes. Every instinct screamed at him to thrash, to claw his way back up.
He did none of that.
Instead, in the crushing dark, he remembered another suffocation. Smoke choking his lungs as tunnels collapsed. Screams cut off mid-breath. The cold slice of that sword through his chest. The way his breath had hitched and stopped as he stared up at the silhouette on the ridge, cloak whipping in the heat.
He had died with hatred clawing at his throat.
Now he let that hatred float in the blood with him. Not to drown in it. To anchor himself to it.
I refused to let go then, he thought. I will not let go now.
His chest began to ache. Muscles spasmed along his ribs. Somewhere nearby, under the red weight, a child was thrashing.
He opened his eyes. Everything was a distorted blur. But movement carried, even in thick liquid. He reached blindly and felt fingers brush his forearm. Too small. Too frantic.
Not Jin. Another child.
In his first life, that child had never surfaced again.
He could not save everyone. He knew that now. Saving everyone was how one died foolishly and changed nothing.
The fingers slid away. The movement stilled.
He closed his eyes again. Let the grief pass like pain. Focused on counting heartbeats instead.
When his lungs were a furnace and lights were starting to pop behind his eyelids, fingers like iron hooks dug into his shoulders and yanked him upward.
He broke the surface with a gasp that tore his throat raw. Air slammed into him like another blow. The cavern snapped back into shape. Torches. Stone. Faces.
Shouting somewhere to his left. Someone being dragged out. Someone not moving.
He brushed blood and poison out of his eyes and pressed his free hand to the pit's rim, steady but not clutching.
Elder Lin watched him closely. For the first time, something like interest stirred in her gaze.
"Name," she said.
In his first life he had mumbled it through chattering teeth, barely conscious. Today he met her eyes the way a knife meets a whetstone.
"Xue Yan," he said. "Of the orphan hall."
Blood Yan. The name the clan had given him when they found him half-starved at the tunnel mouth years ago. He had cursed that name often.
Now he carried it like any other weapon.
Lin's mouth twisted. "You didn't flail. You didn't cling. You didn't faint." Her gaze flicked past him briefly, toward Jin, then back. "You will live long enough to be broken properly."
She stepped aside and gestured toward the stone steps.
"Out. Next group."
He climbed from the pit. Each movement left streaks of dark red on the stone, liquid dripping from his body. The burn had settled deeper now, nested in his muscles and bones. His legs trembled once and stopped when he forced them still.
Jin staggered up beside him, face white, eyes too wide. But he was breathing. He was standing.
"You're insane," Jin whispered hoarsely. "You planned that. You… you knew."
"I guessed," he said.
Jin stared at him for a heartbeat longer, then barked out a weak laugh and shook his head, sending droplets everywhere.
"Fine," Jin muttered. "Then be insane again later. If I die because you stop guessing, I'll haunt you."
He didn't say that Jin already had. For years.
They moved to the side ledge where servants waited with rough cloths. As one wiped him down, he let his gaze drift up toward the far shadows of the cavern.
Other elders watched from above. Ash Stream robed figures. Venom Stream. And, on the highest ledge, a man in darker robes than any other.
The Patriarch.
Even from here, small and half-blind with blood, he knew that posture. That stillness. The weight of it.
In his first life, he had only ever seen the Patriarch from a distance. A giant carved from stone, untouchable. Later, he had seen him fall from that ledge, chest opened by a sword of cold white light.
Now, the Patriarch's gaze swept the children. Paused not at him, but near him. On Jin. On the trembling boy two places down who would not survive the next trial.
I am here, he thought, absurdly. I remember how you died.
He almost laughed at the uselessness of that thought.
A faint prickle touched the back of his neck.
Not from the Patriarch. Not from any elder.
It was…inside.
For a moment, the cavern dimmed. The sound of dripping water sharpened. Every breath, every heartbeat around him became too loud, too clear.
[Rebirth trauma detected.]
The words weren't heard. They simply existed. Imprinted somewhere behind his eyes.
[Residual emotional load: extreme.]
[Host survival in demonic environment: low.]
[Initializing support protocol…]
His fingers clenched around the cloth in his hand.
So. You came with me after all.
He had no name for it yet. No understanding of modules or functions. Only the instinctive knowledge that this…thing…had not been there in his first life.
Fine, he thought, watching Jin breathe, watching the next group of children sink into the blood, already knowing how many would not rise.
Then watch. And remember. We will not die the same way twice.
A faint, cold pulse answered him.
[System seed awakening…]
[Module 1: Recollection Fracture - locked.]
[Module 2: Blood Purity - locked.]
[Module 3: Demonic Echo - locked.]
[Module 4: Crimson Threads - locked.]
[Module 5: Fate Scar - locked.]
[Current function: Observation only.]
Of course. Nothing in this world gave power without cost. Not the clan. Not the mountain. Not fate.
He let out a slow breath and rolled his shoulders once, feeling the poisons settle deeper into his flesh.
"Rat?" Jin nudged him. "You drifting off again?"
"No," he said softly. His gaze never left the pits. "I'm just…remembering."
Jin snorted. "You haven't lived enough to remember anything."
He did not answer.
Outside the cavern, Poisoned Ridge breathed its first full breath of the day. Above the mountain, the sun was rising behind layers of poisoned mist.
Down in the blood-lit hollow, Xue Yan stood in a body seven years old, carrying a lifetime of failure in his bones, a newborn system coiled like a serpent behind his eyes, and a single thought burning brighter than any torch.
This time, we live. This time, we break our chains before the sword finds us.
And when the Swordsman comes… I will be ready to remember his face as I cut him down.