Chapter 1: No Regrets
"Old bastard Demon Shree Yan, surrender! You can't escape. We've surrounded the plains—your end is here!"
"You used me as a tool! You killed my entire family! Now I will watch you die!"
The shouts swirled around him—a chorus of anger, pain, and rage. But Shree Yan stood motionless, a statue of calm in the storm, his face an impassive mask.
The earth was a carpet of the dead, thousands strong. A river of blood cut through the grotesque landscape of torn bodies and spilled viscera. Shree Yan's robes, saturated in crimson, flapped in the wind like a tattered battle standard. Yet in his eyes, there was no fear. Only void.
---
"Hand over the gun, Thunglung Dungma! There's no escape! The building is surrounded! The plains are surrounded!"
The police officer's voice cracked like a whip across the rooftop. "Your crime… is patricide!" His eyes were hard, glinting in the sun.
Thunglung Dungma didn't flinch. His gaze was pure defiance, his breath a ragged mix of fury and grief. "This wasn't a crime," he said, the words trembling. "That man… was my hell. Killing him was justice."
He edged closer to the precipice, the wind whipping around him as a desperate chorus. "If you won't believe me," he whispered, his resolve crumbling into something sharp and final, "if no one will stand with me… then I end it. Now."
The city held its breath. Only the wind spoke.
Thunglung Dungma leapt.
He fell without a sound, his eyes holding not fear, but a scorching, righteous anger. Even if I die, I will laugh at death and the heavens. The vow was a silent roar in his skull as the earth spiraled up to claim him.
The officers below watched, stunned, as he plummeted. He closed his eyes, accepting the end with an eerie peace, his body a dark stroke against the sky—a shadow discarding the world.
---
Shree Yan turned slowly, his voice a low murmur to the carnage. "The blue sky… it rises even above the highest peaks."
A sliver of distant light caught his features. His hair was the white of ancient snow, speaking of lifetimes of burden. And his eyes… they were abysses, bottomless and unreadable.
Below him stretched the field of his making: corpses, blood-rivers, endless death. He was painted in it, his hands heavy with the weight of every extinguished life.
"But today, the sky is choked with black clouds. The mountaintop drowns in shadow." His soliloquy was for no one but the dead. "A lone traveler on the demonic path looks down… and sees a thousand corpses. A river of blood."
He was that traveler, stained and burdened, yet he walked on. "I must drown in this road," he whispered to the fading light, "but I have no regrets for the demonic path I have walked."
He turned. Before him, a throng of men—veterans in their prime, youths with untested courage—instinctively retreated a step.
One found his voice, a tremor of false bravery in it. "Demon! Your final act? Your end is written by heaven itself! Hand over the Rana, and your death will be painless."
"Death? By your hand?" Shree Yan's voice was a calm so profound it felt like violence. A faint, cruel curve touched his lips. "Even if I die, I will laugh at death and the heavens."
The laugh that followed was hollow, a sound that drained warmth from the air. He laughed again, louder, and the emptiness in it froze the blood of those who heard.
"Weapons!" someone shrieked. "Why do you laugh, demon? Heaven has decreed your end!"
Shree Yan's eyes glinted, twin pools of void. "How insulting," he said, his tone icy. "You speak as if death would dare lay a finger on me."
With deliberate, theatrical slowness, he raised the sacred, forbidden Rana to his lips and swallowed it whole.
"Now," he breathed, the word barely a whisper yet carrying to all. "How will you take it from me? It is already consumed."
A wave of shock and fury broke over the soldiers. "Monster! Die!" They charged, a tide of blind hatred.
Shree Yan did not move. He waited. He let them come.
When the first blade bit into his flesh, a ghost of a smirk touched his pale lips. Now. This is the moment.
A heartbreak later, a sun was born from his chest.
Searing white light exploded outward, devouring the battlefield in a holocaust of fire, blood, and atomized earth. Screams vanished into the overwhelming roar of annihilation.
As his body dissolved into the brilliant core of the blast, Shree Yan's final thought crystallized, cool and detached: If death is inevitable, why die alone? Let the world burn with me.
The light faded.
Silence. Nothing moved. Nothing remained but scorched soil and the echoing absence of a man who chose oblivion over surrender.
---
A blaze of light seared a different darkness—and within it, a figure stood. Faceless, more shadow than substance, it smiled.
Thunglung Dungma stared, bewildered, paralyzed. Then it was gone.
And he was… elsewhere.
Where am I?
The thought sparked panic, ice flooding his veins. He was in a room—a house. A dull, persistent throb began at the base of his skull.
Then, the flood.
Memories that were not his own—Shree Yan's memories—crashed into him. A torrent of images, cold strategies, and utter, emotionless resolve. His own consciousness reeled, hollowed out, then refilled with a foreign will. His eyes, once his own, now mirrored the ancient, depthless gaze of the demon.
For ten exact minutes, he sat in absolute silence, mastering the rhythm of a stranger's breath.
Finally, he dared to form the terrifying question: Whose body is this?
The answer came with chilling clarity. This man—this life—was already over. A past life. A vessel left vacant. Why am I here? Who sent me?
His hand pressed against the unfamiliar chest. Beneath the stillness, he felt it: the lingering resonance of a single, obsessive desire. Eternal life. The original owner had failed.
Thunglung Dungma's new resolve crystallized, hard and cold as diamond.
If this Shree Yan could not achieve immortality, then he—Thunglung Dungma, reborn from despair and fury—would finish it. He would seize the eternity that was denied.
And he would find the smiling shadow that threw him into this cruel world.
And he would get his answers.