The transition from the absolute silence of the Void to the deafening reality of the physical world was a violent, sensory assault.
His lungs, entirely new and untested, seized upon the freezing air of the chamber. Instinct, primal and undeniable, forced them to expand, and he let out a sharp, ragged wail. The sound of his own voice—a fragile, high-pitched cry of a newborn—was shocking to him. But the shock of his own existence was immediately drowned out by the sheer volume of his surroundings.
He was being held by trembling hands.
Through the thin, sensitive skin of his infant body, he could feel the frantic, terrifyingly fast pulse of the person holding him. It was a woman, but not the one whose heartbeat he had listened to from the womb. Her breathing was shallow, hitched with pure, unfiltered terror.
What's happening? he thought, his consciousness struggling to anchor itself in this tiny, helpless vessel. Why is she so afraid?
He tried to use his absolute hearing to map the room, to regain the control he had possessed in his past life. The acoustics told him a story: vast, high ceilings built of dense, cold stone. Tapestries hung on the walls, absorbing the sharper echoes. The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood, the sharp scent of burning herbs, and a strange, heavy ozone-like pressure he had never felt before—a pressure that hummed with a frequency of its own. Magic.
There were at least a dozen people in the room. Maids huddled in the corners, their heartbeats fluttering like trapped birds. A woman lay on a bed in the center of the room; her heartbeat was weak, exhausted, but thrumming with a desperate, fierce adrenaline.
My mother, he realized. The realization brought a strange flutter to his tiny chest.
But the overriding emotion in the chamber was not joy, nor the expected relief of a successful birth. It was suffocating dread.
"The eyes... Gods have mercy... look at his eyes," the woman holding him whispered again. Her voice was cracking. He could hear the synovial fluid in her knee joints grinding as her legs threatened to give out.
My eyes? In his past life, his eyelids had been permanently sealed shut, fused by a congenital defect. He had never even possessed the muscular memory to open them. But now, he felt the heavy, wet weight of eyelids. He felt the instinct to pull them back.
With monumental effort, fighting against the sluggishness of his newborn muscles, he opened his eyes.
For a man who had never seen light, the expectation was a blinding flash, a burst of colors he had no names for. He braced himself for the pain of illumination.
But there was no light. There was only the Abyss.
When his eyelids parted, the world did not resolve into shapes and colors. Instead, a violent, suffocating shade of abyssal purple flooded his consciousness. It was the exact same maddening color he had witnessed in the Void before his transmigration.
He wasn't just seeing the world; he was projecting the Void onto it.
Wherever his gaze landed, reality seemed to weep. He looked at the stone ceiling, and he could literally see the microscopic vibrations holding the rock together begin to shudder and fray under an impossible gravity.
Then, he looked at the woman holding him.
The midwife was an older woman, her face lined with decades of experience. But as Kaiser's abyssal purple eyes locked onto hers, her expression contorted into an absolute, sanity-shattering horror.
To Kaiser, she didn't look like a normal human. Through the filter of the Void, he saw the pulsing, fragile web of her nervous system. He saw her 'soul'—a pale, flickering blue light—and as his purple gaze rested upon her, that light began to curdle and dim. The Void was hungry. It was a passive, terrifying force of nature, a localized black hole of madness that leached the sanity and vitality from whatever it observed.
The midwife gasped, a wet, choking sound. Her eyes rolled back into her head, the whites showing. Blood began to trickle from her left nostril. Her mind, exposed to the raw, unfiltered essence of the Void, was cracking like fragile glass under immense pressure.
Stop, Kaiser commanded himself, panic surging through his tiny form. Look away! Close them!
But newborn bodies do not obey the complex commands of an adult consciousness. His motor controls were non-existent. He couldn't force his eyelids shut. He was trapped, staring at the woman, watching as his very existence began to tear her mind apart.
She screamed—a guttural, mindless sound of pure agony—and her arms went limp.
Kaiser felt the sensation of weightlessness as he was dropped. The stone floor rushed up to meet him. His absolute hearing calculated the distance, the velocity, the inevitable shattering of his fragile new skull.
Boom.
The sound was like a cannon firing within the chamber. It wasn't an explosion of fire, but a physical displacement of air so violent it rattled the tapestries.
Before Kaiser could hit the stone, a massive force intercepted him. Huge, gauntleted hands wrapped around his tiny body, catching him with shocking gentleness mere inches from the ground.
Kaiser's ears rang from the sudden rush of air. He tried to look at his savior, his purple eyes shifting upward.
He saw a mountain of sheer, compressed violence.
The man holding him was massive. Through the distorting, purple lens of the Void, Kaiser saw an aura of blinding, crimson energy radiating from the man's core, so dense and powerful it physically pushed back against the encroaching madness of Kaiser's gaze. It was like watching a roaring wildfire clash against a tidal wave of dark water.
This was Duke Arthur Warborn. His father.
"Step away from the heir," the Duke's voice rumbled. It was a voice forged in authority, deeper than thunder, vibrating with a commanding resonance that demanded absolute obedience.
The midwife, freed from Kaiser's gaze, collapsed onto the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, clutching her head as she mumbled incoherent prayers to dead gods. The maids in the corners wept in terror, none daring to move.
"Arthur..." a weak, desperate voice called from the bed. The Duchess. Her heartbeat was erratic, spiking with maternal panic. "Arthur... what is happening? Give him to me. Let me see my son."
The Duke did not move toward the bed. He stood frozen, staring down at the infant in his hands.
Kaiser met his father's gaze.
Even the mighty Duke of the North, a man who had slaughtered thousands on the battlefield, flinched. Kaiser saw the crimson aura surrounding his father flicker and warp. The Duke's jaw clenched, the muscles in his neck bulging as he physically fought against the psychic pressure radiating from his newborn son's eyes.
The Void whispered promises of entropy, of eternal silence, of madness. It pulled at the Duke's formidable mind, seeking a crack in his defenses.
"These eyes..." the Duke whispered. The thunder in his voice was gone, replaced by a tense, chilling awe. He wasn't looking at a baby. He was looking at an existential threat. "A curse. The abyss itself has taken root in my bloodline."
Close them, Kaiser mentally screamed at his own useless body. Please, just close them. He could hear his mother crying now, her pleas growing more frantic as she struggled to sit up, restrained by the remaining healers. He was terrifying his own parents in the first minutes of his life. The heavy sorrow he had felt before dying in his past life returned, tenfold.
He had wanted to see the world. But he had not wanted to destroy it just by looking at it.
"Give him to me!" his mother shrieked, a burst of raw, violent mana exploding from the bed, shattering a nearby water basin. "He is my child!"
The Duke's crimson aura flared, stabilizing his mind against the Void's onslaught. He made a decision. A brutal, necessary calculation.
Slowly, deliberately, the Duke lowered his massive, calloused hand over Kaiser's face.
The rough leather of the Duke's gauntlet pressed against Kaiser's brow, covering his eyes completely.
Instantly, the suffocating, abyssal purple filter vanished.
Darkness returned.
For Kaiser, it was the familiar, comforting darkness he had known for thirty-two years. The crushing psychic pressure in the room immediately evaporated. The heavy, maddening hum of the Void was silenced, replaced by the normal, chaotic symphony of the physical world.
He could hear the maids gasping in relief, the sudden drop in their heart rates. He heard the Duke exhale a long, ragged breath, the sound of a warrior who had just barely survived a mortal blow.
Trapped beneath his father's hand, returned to his sightless existence, Kaiser finally found the strength to stop crying. He went completely still, his absolute hearing expanding outwards, painting the room in vibrations and echoes once more.
"Arthur..." his mother wept, her voice broken. "What is wrong with him?"
The Duke remained silent for a long moment. Kaiser could hear the grinding of his father's teeth, the heavy, deliberate thud of his massive heart.
"He is a Warborn, Eleanor," the Duke finally spoke, his voice regaining its iron edge, though a tremor of unease remained hidden beneath the bass. "But his gaze... his gaze belongs to the abyss. If he looks upon the weak, they will shatter."
The Duke shifted his grip, carefully ensuring his hand never left the upper half of Kaiser's face as he turned toward the bed.
"Bring me a cloth," the Duke commanded the room, his tone brooking no argument. "Black silk. Thick. Fold it thrice."
Kaiser rested in the dark, the warmth of his father's heavy hand the only thing keeping the madness of the Void at bay. He had been reborn into a world of magic and monsters, granted the sight he had begged for in his dying moments.
But as the heavy footsteps of a maid approached with the requested silk, Kaiser realized the cruelest irony of his reincarnation.
He had been given eyes that could see the very fabric of reality. But to protect the world, and the family he had just been born into, he would have to spend this life exactly as he had spent his last.
In the dark.