I turned two today.
Not in the "cake and presents" sense. More in the "holy abyss, I have been trapped in this miniature flesh prison for two years" sense.
Two years of soft linens, milk teeth, and—worst of all—naps.
You have not known humiliation until you've been the former Sovereign of Hell, feared devourer of archangels, now lying belly-up in a velvet crib as someone pinches your cheeks and calls you "pudding prince."
Yes, pudding. Apparently, my cheeks are "irresistibly squishy."
As if they're some tragic dessert that deserves cooing and unsolicited nibbling.
I used to reduce planets to ash. Now I get tucked in under blankets embroidered with baby lambs. BABY. LAMBS.
And not once—not once—have I incinerated a single one. Growth, I suppose.
My name is Fuoco Cattivo. Youngest son of House Cattivo, one of the Four Great Ducal Houses of the Asgardian Empire.
Technically nobility.
Practically a glorified decorative vase with limbs.
Which sounds glamorous until you realize it means I'm stuck in etiquette drills, state ceremonies, and the constant, looming threat of being poisoned by a cousin with too much ambition and not enough subtlety.
Seriously, if I hear one more snide "Oops, wrong teacup, dear cousin," I might start biting ankles.
House Cattivo rules the western territories—lush forests, endless vineyards, and a coastline lined with golden cliffs that shine like fire at sunset. Honestly, it's pretty. Stupidly so.
Sometimes I stare out of the nursery balcony, draped in baby-blue velvet like some royal prisoner, and think, You know, for a mortal realm born from draconic skeletons and divine hubris… it's offensively pleasant.
The Cattivo family was old money. Ancient, really. They'd traded in war and wine, sin and steel, long before the Empire of Asgardia was ever carved from the bones of drakes and gods.
"Good morning, young master Fuoco!"
Ah, here comes Beppo. One of the maids' sons assigned to "keep me entertained." Translation: designated fall guy for any chaos I unleash.
He's twelve, always smells like jam, and thinks pulling faces is comedy gold.
"Did you sleep well?"
I stare at him. Deeply. Meaningfully. The same stare I once used to break the will of a pride-lord demon who consumed entire solar systems.
Beppo giggles.
…Imbecile.
Our estate alone could swallow a kingdom. Marble halls, enchanted gardens, seventy-three bedrooms (not counting the ones only ghosts use), and enough staff to wage a minor war.
My father, Duke Salvestro Cattivo, is a stern man with a jaw sharp enough to slice cheese.
I've met him three times in two years.
Each time felt like a tax audit conducted by an obsidian statue with opinions.
Not that I care. He's the kind of person who can glare in complete silence and still make a grown knight confess to crimes he hasn't committed.
During our last "bonding session," he looked at me for a full fifteen seconds, nodded once, and left.
A lesser child would've cried.
I simply pooped out of spite.
He also has three wives.
I was born from the third.
My mother is Lady Florencia, the softest creature this cursed earth has ever spat out.
Her hair is the color of stormy silk, her voice gentler than any lullaby I've ever heard—even in Hell—and she always smells faintly of tea roses and stolen time.
She visits me every morning and evening, whispering stories and brushing my hair back as if she still can't believe I exist.
Out of all this palace of blood and politics, she's the only human I allowed to touch me.
"Good morning, darling," she whispers today, smiling as she sits by my bedside with her usual teacup.
She kisses my forehead like I'm some divine miracle instead of a recycled tyrant in toddler form.
"I brought you a little song today."
She starts humming. The song is about a starlit boat and lovers lost at sea.
I hate how much I like it.
Of course, being the child of the third wife doesn't earn me much status.
The first wife's son, Bastiano, is heir.
The second wife's daughter, Lavinia, is scheming.
And me?
I'm the adorable footnote.
At least, that's what they think.
"Little pudding prince!" Lavinia trills as she passes the nursery door.
Her voice is the aural equivalent of stepping on a rake.
"Do try not to choke on your own cuteness."
She tosses a silk scarf over her shoulder like a villainess in a mid-tier opera.
The air smells faintly of poison and peach perfume.
In a few years, she'll probably try to stab me with a monogrammed hairpin.
I'm actually looking forward to it.
Bastiano, on the other hand, is too busy "heir-ing" to bother.
That boy has been reading military doctrine since he was six months old.
The best part?
No one takes me seriously.
I can smirk at gossip from behind my crib bars, pretend not to understand political subtext while absorbing every syllable, and even sneak into high-level conversations because someone assumed I was "just a sleepy dumpling."
Fools.
All of them.
But two years… two years was long enough.
Long enough for my soul to stop twitching like a roasted imp.
Long enough to understand the rhythms of this world—the way the air shimmered faintly before rain, the hidden mana lines woven through the estate like veins of sleeping dragons, the oppressive pressure of being adorable.
And long enough to begin my work.
Recreating my Devil Core.
That's what this is really about. Not the family. Not the past.
The present. The purpose.
You see, when I cast the Circle of Causality spell, I shattered my own devil mana core—a concentrated, self-forged nexus of infernal essence, refined over billions of years, embedded into the very structure of my being.
A creation so perfect that lowly gods wept at its brilliance.
And now… I was starting again.
In a body that could barely hold a bowel movement.
Which would've been fine—if not for the body.
At first, it seemed promising.
I could feel flickers of mana early on. A strange warmth in my diaphragm. A thrum behind the ribs.
I would close my eyes, focus my intent, visualize the shape of my old core—dark and flawless, spinning like a black sun, a perfect geometric void that pulsed with hatred and purpose—and draw in ambient mana from the world.
A world that, I must admit, had surprisingly delicious mana. Like aged wine with a whisper of divine corrosion.
I began in secret. Of course. Even my nursery had eyes.
Midnights in the castle gardens, beneath the twin moons, I'd slip away.
Picture this: a two-year-old with smudged cheeks, in footie pajamas embroidered with baby phoenixes, drawing pentagrams with chalk and muttering dead languages under his breath.
The stuff of nightmares. Or bedtime stories, depending on your alignment.
I even reverse-engineered soul-condensation theory using burnt crayon drawings and a forbidden grimoire hidden inside a bookshelf.
I was two, yes. But I was also Asmodus.
One does not simply forget being Hell's Eternal Sovereign just because they've developed an aversion to mashed peas.
But every time I gathered enough mana to begin shaping the proto-core, it failed.
Collapsed. Evaporated. Dissolved like sugar in tea.
And not due to lack of technique.
Don't insult me.
I invented half those techniques during the Siege of the Celestial Gates, thank you very much.
No. It was something else.
Something deeper.
It was on the forty-seventh failure—yes, I kept count—while I sat on the cold nursery floor, panting, chalk in one hand and a fizzled fragment of essence in the other, that I finally understood.
This body…
It refused me.
Let me explain.
You see, all living beings in this world—mortals, monsters, mages—possess a certain affinity.
A natural resonance toward an elemental, spiritual, or divine principle.
For some, it's flame. For others, water or shadow. A few rare freaks—who frankly need to pick a lane—have dual affinities. Annoying, but manageable.
My old self? Oh, I was special. Not in the "gifted child in need of therapy" way.
In the "corruptor of realms, breaker of cosmic rules" way.
My affinity was pure devil energy—a forbidden class of entropy-structured spiritual essence that corrupted the natural order by intention alone.
Yes, you heard me right. Just me standing near a sacred grove would make the trees scream in Latin and self-immolate out of shame.
But this new body?
It had a different blueprint.
A... divine one.
I know.
I threw up in my mouth a little too.
It is nearly impossible to have a divine attribute with a mortal body. A soul, sure. But a squishy, snack-eating, nose-picking flesh puppet?
That's rare. Suspiciously rare.
Maybe the Cattivo family ancestors had… relations. With gods.
Which, frankly, sounds exactly like something our house would do. Wine. War. Bed a deity on a full moon. Write poetry about it. Pass down the spark like it's a silver heirloom.
What matters is this:
A mortal body functions like a mana capacitor—a lattice structure of spiritual vessels, or Meridial Channels, running through and around the biological form.
These channels pulse and loop around energy nodes known as Wells, centered at the heart, navel, and between the brows.
Now, when a body is born with divine affinity, its channels are positively harmonized.
That means it naturally attracts, retains, and processes mana aligned with order, light, healing, celestial fire—all the good and nauseating stuff.
Its Meridial frequency is a stable π/φ resonance—about 1.618 Hz in astral terms.
Yes. Divine energy hums at the golden ratio.
How poetic.
Devil energy?
It pulses on a negative fractal harmonic—chaotic, recursive, logarithmic at a base of -e.
The irrational inverse of divine constants. The noise under silence. The entropy in creation's code.
We're like oil and holy water.
Or wine and babysitting.
So what happens when you try to insert a -e shaped core into a body built around π/φ resonance?
Boom.
That's what happens.
Violent rejection. Like mismatched puzzle pieces trying to occupy the same space-time node.
The result? Fizzle. Collapse. Or in worse cases—implosion.
In layman's terms:
This body thinks devil energy—aka my entire past metaphysical existence—is poison.