Vir reached out to his body—his real, physical body, not the one stuck inside this mindscape. The one that no doubt rested on a comfortable bed somewhere.

  He felt the pulse of his heart, the flow of his blood, the slow cycling of his prana. A body at rest, in a deep slumber from which he could not wake.

  Vir hesitated, entirely unsure of what he was about to do.

  He was no stranger to controlling the blood that coursed through his body. It felt like a lifetime ago now, but he had done it countless times during his early days of prana manipulation, before he had unlocked the secret to decoupling prana from blood flow. The process had never been pleasant, even during the best of times.

  In lieu of getting prana to move faster, he’d found all sorts of ways of shortening the distance his blood could travel—all to get a bit more prana to his Talents.

  The process had been one filled with agony, of burst veins and arteries when he inevitably failed. Looking back now, Vir was shocked he’d survived the ordeal at all.

  And all of it had been to improve himself. To further develop his capacities.

  Now he was trying to end his life. Not figuratively, but literally.

  For the first step in reforging his soul was to die, and trapped in this mindscape, his options were limited.

  Vir had to reach out to his body and stop his own heart. As terrifying as that sounded, it was but the first of many steps involved in the reconstruction of his being. Steps that Jalendra had promised would prove to be far worse than mere death.

  Yet Vir had prepared for this moment for years in this mindscape, and so, his hesitation lasted only a moment before he grasped his heart and pulled the prana away, stilling it.

  Without the powerful muscle to propel it, the blood in his body halted, the prana beginning to decay in just moments.

  It wasn’t long before death claimed his mind, and his chakras closed one by one. The Crown, at first, followed by the Third Eye. The Heart, the Warrior, and Life in quick succession.

  Eventually, the Foundation Chakra that Vir had mastered so long ago finally collapsed under the all-consuming hunger of death.

  The mindscape shrank and crumbled, the great forest of the Godshollow dissolving before his eyes.

  All his predecessors assembled before him. Ekanai the Reaper, Shardul the Vicious, Narak the Destroyer, Jalendra the Wise. Even Parai the Ancient—the oldest of his incarnations with whom Vir had interacted only once prior, when he’d been about to die in the Mahādi Realm.

  Vir acknowledged each in turn. Each had laid steps along the path of the success he’d enjoyed thus far. Where they had failed, Vir had learned, and without them, he would have died long ago. The Akh Nara was not Ekavir or Parai or Jalendra. It was all of them, working to pave the way for the ones who came after.

  “Should this fail,” Jalendra said, “I want you to know that we are all proud of you. Figments of your memory though we may be, I feel confident your actual predecessors would have felt the same. You have come far, Ekavir, from the child you once were. Should this be your end, let it at least be a restful one.”

  Vir smiled back, despite the pain of death. “Don’t count me out yet, old man. I suspect you’ll be seeing me a fair bit in the near future.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Jalendra barked out a full laugh. “I would like nothing more,” he said, as his form began to crumble away like everything else.

  His predecessors disappeared one by one, and soon, Vir was alone. Surrounded by an endless abyss of darkness.

  And then, it started.

  What remained of his tattered soul began to unravel, its energy dissipating into a void beyond comprehension and understanding.

  It was here, at the end of all things, that the most difficult task of Vir’s life began.

  Grasping on to the last threads of his consciousness, Vir forced himself to stay cogent, to control an energy he no longer had any right to possess.

  With all the willpower Vir could muster, he forced it to hold together. To not dissipate as it so desperately wished.

  The motes of his soul coalesced once again… but his tribulation had only just begun, for the moment he succeeded, his soul began to move.

  Not in any physical way, but beyond the fabric of space and time itself.

  Vir’s soul drifted through darkness, a single mote of light in an endless void.

  That mote was soon joined by another. Then another.

  Souls of the dead, all bound for their next life. All destined to have their memories and identities stripped away.

  Soon, there were thousands—millions—all flowing along the same river.

  Vir could not explain how he knew any of this, for he was neither conscious nor even alive at this point. Yet something compelled him. To hold to a singular thought.

  The refusal to allow himself to disperse.

  He clung to it, just barely managing to hold himself together as he drifted through a vast cosmic ocean.

  He wove and bobbed through the eddies, down waterfalls and across endless seas in a single moment that spanned centuries.

  Then, at long last, the darkness ended, giving way to a blinding, searing light.

  His soul, like the others near him, had reached their destination.

  And the agony began.

  To keep a soul intact between reincarnations was unnatural. It went against the very laws of the universe, and so the universe protested.

  It sought to tear his mind apart, to unravel all that he was. To strip down his soul to nothing but the bare minimum, casting off his sorrows and his happiness, his hard work and everything that he was. Gone forever.

  Vir fought a war, not for life or land, but for something far more precious. Identity.

  In the mindscape, Vir thought he had grown accustomed to the gut-wrenching scar that marred his soul. Now, however, he realized that what his suffering was but a pale shadow of the torment a soul underwent when being ripped apart.

  This time, the very core of who he was stood on the brink of destruction.

  Over and over, forces beyond mortal comprehension attempted to shatter him, battering his will like unending waves upon a stormy shore.

  Yet Vir resisted. He resisted with everything he had. For the realm that needed him. For the Garga that worshiped him. For Cirayus, who had risked it all to raise him…

  For Maiya. His most precious person.

  His thoughts narrowed to a single point, his intent refined into a singularly unshakable will.

  To stay together. To remain whole. For her.

  The war of wills spanned centuries and passed in less than a single second. It spanned universes and took no space at all.

  Both contradictions. Both truths in this place where the regular rules of causality held no sway.

  The battle raged eternally. It was over before it began.

  The waves retreated. The winds abated. The force had tried to rip him apart, and it had failed.

  Had he truly prevailed? Or had it simply given up? Vir could not know.

  All that mattered was that he had survived. Energy surged into him, filling his soul and mending the cracks. Closing gaps and healing scars. Rebuilding him from nothing.

  Owing to him retaining his identity, Vir was not a mere observer in this process, as all other souls were.

  He retained his awareness, analyzing the process in detail. It reminded him of prana manipulation—his earliest training. And with his mind now freed from the pain, Vir applied the full force of his will, guiding that energy, condensing it tighter and denser than it could have otherwise been.

  He couldn’t explain why—only that it felt right. More grounded in reality than he ever had been.

  And when he had condensed all the energy he possibly could, he saw it.

  A tiny thing, buried deep within his soul. A blemish.

  At the core of his very soul lay a sliver of darkness. A fragment of the void itself. Something alien—something that did not belong.

  Thinking it was another scar from his shattered soul, Vir went to remove it but stopped.

  For he recognized what it was. It was a shape of an event. One that was destined but yet to occur.

  The moment of my death, Vir realized, staring deep into it, hoping to glean more…

  But his time was up.

  His reforged soul was wrenched from the cosmic space, and Vir was deprived of the opportunity. He was not yet ready to glimpse this cosmic secret.

  Slowly, with great effort, he opened his eyes.

  Not to a mural-painted ceiling or a four-poster bed, but to a red-headed angel in tears, sobbing upon his chest.