Some hours earlier—when they had first entered the library—
the guards had stepped aside.
The heavy doors opened with absolute silence, and beyond them waited a world of endless shelves, ancient pages, and a quiet so deep it felt alive. The towering rows of books rose like city walls, stretching so far that they vanished into dim golden light. Floating rune-lamps drifted overhead like silent fireflies, their glow soft and unmoving.
The air smelled of old paper, polished wood, and something else beneath it all—
mana.
Dense. Ancient. Settled into the library like breath into lungs. It pressed lightly against the skin, not enough to hurt, but enough to remind every visitor that this place was older than them, calmer than them, and far more patient.
Tara's breath caught.
Ahaan's eyes widened as he stared at the towering shelves, the endless books, the quiet order of it all. For a few moments, even his thoughts slowed, as if the library itself demanded stillness before understanding.
Rowan noticed the look in Ahaan's eyes and smiled. "Look, Ahaan. Whatever you want to read, it's here."
Nyra gave Rowan a small glance and said softly, "What he's able reading books at this age is already frightening."
Rowan looked at her and answered with a wide, shamelessly proud older-brother smile.
"He's a really special child," Nyra added, this time while watching Ahaan more carefully.
But Ahaan was no longer listening.
His eyes had already moved across the shelves and landed on a single book.
World and Powers.
Yes.
That was it.
If anything in this place could help him understand the world he had been reborn into, it would be that.
From Tara's arms, Ahaan pointed toward the book. Rowan noticed immediately and followed his gaze.
"Oh…" Rowan said, amused. "So, you want that one."
They soon settled at a table, and Rowan placed Ahaan down with the book. Then Rowan gathered a few books into his own arms and said, "Okay… now we have to split."
Tara stiffened at once. "Split…?"
Rowan's eyes stayed on the corridor ahead. "Actually, we need to study about ancient powers, and those books are in the third hall. Babies aren't allowed there. So, for now, we have to separate."
Nyra stepped forward before Tara could worry too much. "Don't worry. We'll be back in a few hours," she said gently.
Then Rowan looked at Ahaan and smiled. "Bro, this is your chance. Read as much as you want. I'll come back soon."
After saying that, he and Nyra began moving away. Before leaving, Nyra glanced back once, raised a hand with a faint smile, and said, "See you in a few hours, little scholar."
Ahaan said nothing, of course.
But his eyes remained on the book.
After they left, Tara placed him at a wide wooden table in the second hall, one made for noble children—smooth, polished, and low enough for smaller hands. Ahaan sat there with quiet seriousness, his little legs not even reaching the floor, both hands holding the book with remarkable care.
Tara sat beside him on a chair, posture straight, her eyes fixed on him.
The sight in front of her felt deeply strange.
A baby.
Sitting like a scholar.
Turning pages with tiny fingers. Eyes narrowed in concentration. Silent. Serious. Tara did not know whether to feel proud, worried, or slightly afraid.
She only knew one thing for certain—
Young Master Ahaan did not look like any ordinary child.
Ahaan, meanwhile, did not care about anything happening around him.
He was already deep inside the book.
He wanted to understand how this world worked—how power moved, how mana flowed through bloodlines, how kingdoms were built, and who truly ruled them. This was important. More important than anything. In his past life, he had ignored all of it completely. He had spent his days laughing with his parents, running with friends, and living inside a small, happy world without ever wondering what the larger one looked like.
And because of that—
he had never realized how many things existed beyond the life he knew.
So now, when fate had thrown him into a second life and forced him to start again, he was not going to waste even a single chance.
Ahaan turned the page.
At the top of the chapter, written in dark ink, was a title:
The Last Divine War
He leaned closer and continued reading.
It spoke of a time when the gods still walked openly, when the world was governed by laws that had not been written by human hands. According to the text, after the war among the gods—an age that ended in their extermination—the world entered a dangerous kind of silence. The heavens had gone empty, and freedom, once treated as a blessing, was no longer restrained by any higher order.
With no divine will left to bind them, both the Devatas and the Asuras were free to move according to their own desires.
That freedom rotted quickly into ambition.
And ambition became fire.
Soon, war broke out between the two factions, a war so vast and violent that history itself named it as if nothing greater could ever come after it.
The Last Divine War.
In that conflict, one Asura of the Twelve was slain, and three Devatas of the Twelve were erased.
Then the book shifted to a smaller subheading, the ink there slightly faded with age.
Aftermath: The Shattered Island
Ahaan's gaze sharpened.
The next paragraphs did not describe the final battle itself. They described what the war had done to the earth.
Before the Last Divine War, the book said, this world had been a single vast island—one unbroken landmass surrounded by sea. But after the war's conclusion, that island fractured into major divisions. The land was torn apart. The world split. And in the end, three main lands remained.
Ahaan's eyes moved faster over the lines now.
The first was called the World of Living—the land where nearly ninety percent of humanity had survived and rebuilt.
And in this land, the book said, there was also a vast region known as the Endless Night Forest—home to the remaining ten percent of monsters, the ones that had always lived in the shadows of the earth… and the ones still being born from it.
Ahaan's eyes moved lower.
The second landmass was called the World of Monsters.
A continent where one hundred percent of its inhabitants were monsters.
And for the past one hundred years, those monsters had not remained mindless beasts. They had grown intelligent. They had learned. They had organized. And in time, they had built kingdoms of their own.
Ahaan's tiny hand tightened around the page.
As he read those lines, the memory of the creature from his past life rose in his mind again—clearer now, sharper, more real. Its shape. Its presence. The fear it had dragged into the air around it.
So, monsters were not merely things that attacked from darkness.
They had structure.
Will.
A world.
He read on.
The third landmass, however, was not described like a normal land. It was written more like a boundary—something stretched between the first two lands, a dividing line that had grown longer bit by bit over time until it cut across the planet like a scar.
Its name was:
Gods' Landing.
A place that stood between the Living and the Monsters. The book described it as a dividing line, a land where most of the people were said to be blessed by the gods. They were born with white hair, and many called it the Land of the Blessed.
Ahaan blinked.
Then thought—
Oh. So that's why everyone reacted like that when they saw my hair.
Then, almost immediately, a second thought followed.
Wait… that means I'm blessed by a god?
For one brief, ridiculous moment, he almost felt impressed with himself.
Then he kept reading.
And in the very next lines, his excitement collapsed into disappointment.
Children born with white hair were indeed called blessed… but only if they were born in Gods' Landing.
Children born with white hair in other lands were not automatically considered blessed. In some cases, the book noted, such children were seen as omens—especially those said to have been born dead, only to return alive again.
Ahaan's face slowly fell into visible disappointment.
Beside him, Tara noticed at once.
"What happened to Young Master now?" she asked, leaning a little closer with real concern—only to find a six-month-old baby staring at a book like it had personally insulted his family line.
Her brows drew together.
"Young Master you look like someone told you the sweets are banned forever."
Ahaan did not respond, but his expression somehow managed to become even more tragic.
Tara stared at him for a second, then muttered to herself, "First I see a baby reading history. Now I'm watching one suffer heartbreak from it."
She folded her hands in her lap and looked upward for patience.
The book, meanwhile, continued.
Beyond those three main lands, it said, there were smaller islands scattered across the seas—broken fragments of the old world, drifting like leftovers from a shattered god.
Ahaan leaned back slightly and stared down at the diagram on the page. His body felt small.
The world felt enormous.
For the first time, the scale of it truly settled into him—not as vague imagination, but as shape, distance, and history. A world of humans. A world of monsters. A dividing land between them. And beyond all of it, islands scattered like the broken memory of something once whole.
He turned the page.
The next chapter was titled:
Rise of Mana
His eyes sharpened again.
After the war, the book said, the concentration of a powerful force—mana—had increased greatly in the atmosphere.
It rose as if something had been unsealed.
As if a lid had been torn from the sky itself.
The book explained that this rise had not been limited to one kingdom or one land. It described it as a world-wide saturation—mana flooding into air, soil, blood, and bone, changing the world from its roots upward.
And then a name appeared on the page that made Ahaan's eyes stop.
Agni Chakra.
A mystical force.
A monster.
A phenomenon.
The text described it as a creature born from the great surge of mana—something like a burning sphere in the sky, a lava-bright existence that shone as if the heavens themselves had split open and left behind a wound.
It had rained fire upon the people.
Ahaan's throat tightened.
His eyes widened, not with surprise, but with recognition. He remembered it too clearly. The burning sky. The terror. The destruction. The way death had once fallen from above like judgment.
And because of that memory, something ugly stirred inside him—not grief, not fear, but irritation.
Why?
Why couldn't he feel what he should have felt?
He remembered surviving it. He remembered losing everything to it. But the emotions themselves refused to rise. It was as if his past had become a story he could recite, but no longer truly live.
The thought left a bitter taste in him.
He lowered his eyes and kept reading.
As Agni Chakra spread devastation, the book explained, the balance of the world shifted violently. Landmasses split. Human territories weakened. Monster populations multiplied. The earth itself changed under the pressure of that age.
Ahaan turned the page again.
The next section was titled:
Eye Clans
It spoke of the old era—before the war—when the colored Eye Clans still existed together. Clans distinguished by something both beautiful and strange. Their members shared matching hair and eye colors through bloodline inheritance, and once, according to the book, they had lived in peace.
But peace had become a story people told their children so they could fall asleep.
The world after the war had not allowed such softness.
Humans began living under the shadow of monsters. Not as rulers, but as survivors. For a long time, they had no real way to stand against them.
And then—
everything changed.
The next section shifted into something more serious.
Mana Lock and Human Evolution
After the war, the book said, certain members of these clans had been described as "miraculously granted" mana. It spoke of something called the Mana Lock—a seal within the human body that restrained the flow of mana. Most people, the text explained, lived and died without ever touching that lock.
Ahaan's eyes narrowed slightly.
So that was it.
Mana was not simply possessed.
It was sealed.
Restricted.
And only a few ever reached it.
That thought alone made the world around him feel more layered, more dangerous, more deliberate than before.
After some time, Ahaan turned the next page.
And then he saw it.
A mark.
A familiar one.
The moment his eyes landed on it, the world inside him lurched.
Because on the page before him, among old ink and faded lines, there was a mark—the very same one that had once appeared on his father's back in his past life.
On Neel's back.
And beneath that mark, written clearly in the book, were the words—
King's Mark.
The book slipped from Ahaan's hands.
His eyes opened wide.
To be continue…