Chapter One.

It occurs to me now that it’s actually been a pretty long time since I last wore pants. Time kinda… blends a bit underground, but I’m pretty sure I died the first time a few months ago now. That’s a fairly significant time period to go as a nudist. I get that ‘sapient, angry puddle’ isn’t exactly a cornerstone of the clothing market and even if it miraculously was, I didn’t exactly have access to it while fleeing for my life thousands of kilometers underground. Still, I’m hoping that I just need to readjust myself to them because otherwise I’ve stumbled upon a very unwelcome truth.

Pants suck.

I’m currently confined by a pair of loose, off-white linen trousers. The fit is terrible and one of the guards had to give me some extra twine to use as a belt. They are itchy (which I desperately hope is a sign of poor craftsmanship and not the previous owner’s hygiene) and smell like… old people? Gross. They were freebies, so I probably shouldn’t complain, but I find myself wishing I could just dissolve into a puddle again and forget about clothes altogether the longer I’m stuck in them.

The rest of what I’ve been given follow the same pattern (though none bug me as much as the pants) with a simple, long-sleeved linen shirt that I tucked in at the waist, and some dark leather boots that went up to mid-calf over a pair of very questionable cotton socks. Patches abound, and I definitely look like a beggar, but the guards I’d run into were nice enough to donate a pile of old clothes like this so I wouldn’t be running around butt-naked.

Which brings me to uncomfortable topic number two.

I glanced to the side and caught my reflection in the glass of the train car I was currently riding in. There was a human boy sitting there. He… didn’t look like me. His skin was pale, almost unhealthily so. Thin, but not scrawny. Shoulder length jet-black hair was tied back to keep it out of the way. Vaguely asiatic facial features that would have been handsome if they weren’t so… infuriating. I felt my fists clenching as I looked at the stranger’s face and met the burning amber eyes reflected in the glass.

Then I looked away, somehow feeling like I’d lost a staring contest.

I had to force myself to calm down quickly when I looked down at my hands and saw that in my anger, the tendrils imitating muscle were writhing around beneath my skin in agitation. After ensuring everything was in the right place, I sighed and brought up the notifications that had greeted me after pulling the divine equivalent of a ‘Karen’ stunt.

ATTENTION.

ADMINISTRATIVE OVERRIDE.

SYSTEM ACCESS UPGRADED.

WELCOME [CONTENDER]!

YOU HAVE BEEN GRANTED THE FOLLOWING TRAITS :

[Inviolate Existence]

You have breached the walls of existence and brought yourself into being despite the very laws of reality saying otherwise. Grants immunity to all pure destruction based effects.

[Cosmic Awakened Soul]

Your soul has been Awakened and bound to the Ideal of Cosmos. The core of your being is the embodiment of natural law, bend it to your will as you see fit. Grants ability to preserve memories and experience after physical death. Will require re-catalyzation to enter any material plane. Additional benefits unlocked with soul progression.

Sub-traits Identified:

[Soul Tongue]

Spoken language is such a primitive means of communication. By experiencing the River of Souls you have rendered such concepts irrelevant. Your soul will translate all communication within sensory rage into an equivalent within your reference. Note: only applies to sapient creatures with souls.

[Astral Body] [RESTRICTED]

[Anathema] [RESTRICTED]

ADMINISTRATIVE OVERRIDE.

COMPATIBLE PHYSICAL FORM SELECTED.

[Outer Kindred]

Stage I: Larva.

Of all the myriad forms taken by the class of beings known as ‘Outsiders’, the Kindred are by far the rarest—being one of the only categories not inimical to the concept of life. Mysterious and reclusive, little is known of them outside of their scattered communities— though some facts have been pieced together over time. Like many Outsiders, they are born directly from the realms between and manifest into reality on its frayed borders. More ‘twin-bodied’ rather than true shapeshifters, they come into being fully grown with outer features fitting the locality of their birth, although some limited abilities to ‘adjust’ these features remain. Within, however, is a creature of lashing tendrils and teeth that will emerge when threatened. As an Outsider, their growth is divided into stages that advance depending on understanding and power, instead of aging over time. Their unique lifecycle means that most never learn of the Kindred’s existence, and they prefer to keep it that way.

Apparently, this was the closest I could get to being human again with the state of my soul. It was weird. The outer features were all there to make me look like a normal enough human, but underneath the skin it was all chitin and tentacles. I hadn’t been alone yet so I wasn’t sure what my alternate form looked like, but the description made it seem suitably horrifying. The important thing was that as a true ‘Sapient’ race it was able to cross through Achoran wards without being repulsed, the physical appearance was secondary. I suppose it beat out being forced to start life again as a puddle, but it still rankled every time I saw the stranger’s face in a reflection. Not that I could really remember what I used to look like anymore.

A side effect of using Anathema so much (without an appropriate fuel source) was the degradation of my soul. It was very much burning the house down so you don’t freeze to death in the interim, and now there were bits… missing. Some of my memories felt ‘grayed out’— faces were blank, emotions were muted, words and thoughts were just a quiet mumble. Other memories were missing entirely, with most of my life before I turned seven or eight just gone. Between that and spending months as an amorphous blob, my real face was as lost as if I’d burned it with Anathema directly. It had honestly been a relief to bargain my use of the black fire away.

That was part of the deal I came up with, to make sure I could come back and not have every godly entity in the universe gunning for my head. I’d phrased it as equal parts a reward for saving the world and the divine equivalent of ‘hush-money’, but the gist of it was simple.

No more divine interference. I will allow restrictions to be placed on me to prevent the use of Anathema in return for help being reborn on Haven so I can hunt down Dezzahn, and kill him. Win-win for everyone.

Of course, the unspoken bit was that my Anathema could burn through their little restriction like a blowtorch through tissue paper, but that was the whole point of this agreement. I couldn’t face a pantheon of literal gods and win, because even if Anathema could likely kill them individually— there wouldn’t be anything of me left afterwards. In the absolute best case, I’d be an empty husk floating mindlessly over a dead world. On the other hand, none of them are in a hurry to have their faces melted off by apocalypse fire. Mutually assured destruction! Yay?

The benefits are they get their ‘champion’ to fight against calamities—like I was supposed to be from the beginning— and I get to look Dezzahn in his bloated face as I tear out his soul and eat it. I also get left alone, because nobody wants to set off the metaphysical equivalent of a nuclear dead-man switch.

It was neat, tidy and wrapped up in a bow. Now I’m on a train bound for the surface. It was weird to be sitting in a train like a normal passenger. Honestly, it was weird to find out they had trains down here. The train was different from ones back on Earth, obviously built by the Achorai during the height of their empire. Their architecture was a beautiful mix of ornate-looking Cambodian and old Greco-Roman and the tunnels we traveled through were all marked by their decorated columns. The train itself was made of stone, looking from the outside like a series of moving, elongated pagodas sliding through grooves in the pale-blue wardstone. I’d since learned that my experience in Nar’Ichoul—the ruined Achoran capitol— of ‘spatial shenanigans’ was a predominant feature in just about everything the Achorai had built. So where normally a journey of thousands of kilometers would take days or weeks even by a fast train, I’d actually be arriving at the exit to the Hollows in just over two hours.

From what I understood, trains like this one are a big part of what makes civilization possible on Haven. The Achorai set them up as part of a huge underground network spanning most of the planet, based close to the surface in the strata known as the Upper Hollows. They ran autonomously, and when the Achorai disappeared the trains just never stopped; keeping to a ghostly schedule traversing the world in silence. The wardstone used in their construction repels monsters and is damn close to indestructible.

The one I’m on is totally empty.

I have absolutely no idea where I managed to ‘spawn in’ this time, but it seems to be in the middle of nowhere based solely on the population. I’ve encountered exactly seven people since I found myself butt-naked in a tunnel, and all of them were guards at the tiny outpost I’d woken up next to. Which led to the first flaw in my master plan for vengeance, because not only did I have no idea where I was, I also had no idea where I was supposed to go.

Haven was at least three times the size of Earth and the interior was completely riddled with caves and tunnels. That gave me an area with a volume of around three trillion cubic kilometers to search for my missing [Blightlings]. With no idea where I was in relation to my first starting point, that was an impossible task. I couldn't just ask random people either— since the last I knew, I was the subject of an international monster hunt directed from the shadows by the goddess of Fate. I might have made a very tentative 'peace' with the gods since then, but something tells me the people are much less likely to forgive and forget.

So with all that, there was only one person on this planet I thought I could trust; Veris Haethram. He taught me to use magic along with almost everything else I knew about Haven. Our relationship had started off a little rocky (what with him trying to disintegrate me before taking me prisoner) but by the end we’d genuinely been friends, at least until his crazy-powerful wife tracked him down and dragged him back home without me. I’d been afraid that he might have given me up to the hunters when they first started coming after me, but the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. My weaknesses were obvious at the time, and my location was static. If Veris had told them about me, then they would have laid a proper ambush for me right from the beginning instead of stumbling on me with a hunting party.

Grimacing, I shook my head to dispel the unpleasant memory of that encounter.

It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know. I couldn’t control it. It was self-defense.

The mantra repeated itself in my head and I struggled to keep myself under control. Doing my best to bury the memories and the wave of nausea that accompanied them, I refocused on the train window beside me and settled in for the ride.

In a couple short hours I’d be arriving in the port city of Delmoth, getting my first glimpse at human society on Haven. My stomach roiled with a combination of nervous anticipation and dread at the enormity of what I had to accomplish. I wondered what civilization would look like, and found myself desperately hoping I could find my way without everything going wrong.

Again.