Hunger arrived like a thing with teeth. It gnawed at him from the inside, unfamiliar and insistent—an animal that would not be ignored.
In the life before, flesh and hunger were abstractions; now they were the whole world.
He blinked up at rough timber, at the thatch where thin lines of morning found the room. Smell hit him before anything else: rot, unwashed bodies, and a softer, final hush.
For a moment his thinking did what it had always done—triage, analysis—until the act of arranging his own thoughts felt like keeping water cupped in both hands. It slipped away.
Decomposition: est. 3–4 days. Priority: remove remains.
The assessment formed automatically, but as he tried to sit up, his mind fractured.
Knowledge existed somewhere in the vast archives of his memory, but accessing it required effort that left his skull throbbing.
He was seven.
The knowledge was there—he could sense its vastness pressing against the inside of his skull—but his child's mind could only grasp fragments before they scattered like startled birds. His body was small, frail, malnourished. His parents were dead.
The parents. The word sent something sharp through his chest. Not pain exactly, but a hollowness that had no name in his previous existence.
He forced himself upright, vision swimming. The hut was exactly as memory suggested—earthen floor, cold cooking pit, two shapes beneath threadbare blankets that would never move again.
He could feel the rough, loose weave of his own blanket, thin and doing little to ward off the chill that seemed to radiate from the ground itself.
They had died for him. The same sacrifice, playing out exactly as before.
Situation: critical. Resources: minimal. Threats: starvation, exposure, discovery.
But beneath the tactical thinking, something else stirred. A pressure behind his eyes, a tightness in his throat.
In his former existence, if he felt those, he would have catalogued these as inefficient biological responses. Now they felt significant in ways that defied categorization.
He stumbled to his feet, legs trembling. The world tilted, and he gripped the wall to steady himself.
His meridians—once rivers of power—were now shriveled threads barely capable of conducting the weakest Qi.
The cruel irony wasn't lost on him: this body could have reached immortality in ten thousand years by talent alone, without deliberate training. Now it was a prison that could barely sustain consciousness.
And yet, something remained. At the very edge of his awareness, a quiet, immense gravity pulled at him—a presence tied to his origin.
He instinctively walled it off in his mind. To even brush against that infinite weight in his current state would be suicide.
Memory access attempt: basic survival knowledge.
The effort was like diving into an infinite library where every book was written in shifting script. Fragments surfaced—cultivation techniques, types of soils, stones, grass, edible plants, shelter construction, laws—then scattered before he could grasp them fully.
Knowledge was there, vast and perfect, but his mortal mind could only hold pieces.
Blood dripped from his nose to the dirt floor.
Warning: cognitive strain.
He had only a bucket to scoop information from and no coordinates or clues of where to search. Searching for plants in his memories might yield some forging fragments instead.
He wiped the blood away with a shaking hand and looked toward the still forms of his parents. In his previous existence, he had observed their sacrifice with detached interest.
They were variables in an equation, necessary elements in his survival calculation. Their love was data to be noted and archived.
Now, looking at the blankets that would never move again, something cracked inside his chest.
His mother's hand was visible, weathered by failed attempts to grow crops in barren soil.
She had given him her portions for weeks, claiming she wasn't hungry while her own cheeks hollowed.
For the first time since whatever had happened to him among the stars, he felt not calculation but something that broke like a small bone inside his ribs.
His breath came in small, useless gulps.
A tear fell. Then another. Salt water on barren earth.
The weakness was intolerable—a crushing weight in his chest that served no logical purpose, that made him vulnerable in ways his former self had never been.
He stood there for long moments, this god reduced to a child, crying over parents who had died to give him another chance at existence.
In gaining the power to rewrite reality itself, he had lost the one thing that made rewriting it worthwhile: his own vision.
Status: critical. Priorities: food, water, burial.
The analytical mind reasserted itself, fighting against the foreign pressure in his chest.
A memory surfaced unbidden: his mother humming while she worked their failing crop rows, her voice soft and off-key but persistent.
She had sung that same melody while rationing the last of their grain, giving him her portion with a smile that hid her hollowed cheeks.
Warning: Irrelevant data. Focus on survival priorities.
But the memory wouldn't dismiss itself as it should have. This was the problem with emotions—they made everything inefficient, clouded judgment with unnecessary attachments.
He surveyed his resources: copper coins beneath loose floorboards, a clay jug with perhaps a day's water remaining, dried grain for maybe two meals if rationed carefully.
He set the clay jug down and stepped outside. The earth behind the hut was hard as old bone, beaten smooth by seasons of drought.
He fetched the shovel wedged near the store of old tools; it felt absurdly heavy in his thin hands, an anchor tied to a world that no longer yielded to thought.
He thrust the blade into the soil and it barely bit, the impact jarring his thin arms right up to the shoulder. Sweat stung his eyes.
Each movement took every available ounce of strength until his fingers burned and small red beads welled where the handle had rubbed.
For a moment his mind tried to offer a dozen solutions—techniques to soften earth, methods to lessen weight—then recoiled at his body, unwilling to be applied through these frail cords.
So he did the only thing his hands could manage: he repeated. One push, rest. One push, breathe. The metallic scent of his own blood began to mingle with the smell of the dry earth.
The shallow scrape deepened a finger's breadth. Dirt crumbled at the edges.
He thought of his mother's palm, rough with work, the way she had pressed a night-warmed biscuit into his hand and smiled away her hunger. The memory steadied him more than any calculation.
When the shovel finally cut a small clump loose, his thumb split on the handle and blood slicked the wood. The sting was sharp and real.
He laughed once—half-pleased, half-crazed—and pressed the soil into the hollow until it would hold a body. Not perfect, not ceremonial. But honest. Enough.
He wiped his hand on his sleeve and, for the first time since the flame unmade him, set small things in motion with the insistence of someone who had chosen them rather than computed them.
Outside, a dog barked in the distance. The chains of time dragged him as they always had, but for the first time since his rebirth, he wasn't calculating paths to power.
That pressure intensified whenever the memories of her humming surfaced.
His hands trembled—not just from hunger, but from something that made optimal decision-making nearly impossible.
The gods who thought they had destroyed him had bound him with chains he'd never known. But chains could be understood, analyzed, and eventually broken. He tasted iron in his mouth and smiled once, small and dangerous.