Weakness.
It was the first coherent thought to pierce the veil of non-existence. A profound, crushing weakness that seeped into the very concept of me, Atrex. My limbs, wherever they were, felt like anchors lost in a cold, deep sea. I tried to command them, to summon the will that once moved mountains, but there was no response. There was only the darkness, a cold and absolute void that pressed in from all sides.
With an effort that felt like shouldering a collapsing star, I fought to open my eyes. The resistance was immense, as if they were sealed shut with lead and sorrow. Finally, a sliver of light broke through. It was a painful, blinding spear in the endless night, and the world it revealed was a smeared, watery abstraction. A blur of grey sky, brown walls, and the oppressive feeling of being trapped. It was like viewing reality through a greasy film, a flawed lens.
It took me a moment to access the lingering echoes in this shell of a body. The blurriness… it was the legacy of tears. The previous owner, whoever he was, had apparently cried himself to death. A grim, and frankly, inconvenient inheritance.
And you all might be thinking: who am I, and what am I doing in the body of some tragically tearful child? Well, to tell you the truth, I'm still processing the sheer, infuriating absurdity of it myself.
You can say that I was a god before this… unfortunate career change. Not one of the big ones, mind you. My job was cosmic logistics. Carry souls to the afterlife, maintain decorum and stability in the lower realms, file the paperwork, etc, etc. It was an eternal, celestial bureaucracy, and it was a very, very boring task. So, to kill a few millennia here and there, I got creative. I started to steal some souls.
Not just any souls. I targeted those on the planet they call Earth. So many of them, filled with regret, desperate for a second chance. I think they call it 'isekai'. I saw it as a favor, really. A philanthropic venture. I'd choose the most desperate, the ones who burned with untapped potential, and give them what they secretly craved. A new world, memories intact, a chance to be the hero. For me? It was my own private live-action show, a fascinating study of human choice under pressure.
But this time, here I am. Who would have thought that I, the one who once isekai'd mortals for a timepass, would get isekai'd myself?
The trouble started, as it always does, with an audit. My Boss, the Supreme God, has a thing for numbers. His gaze, when it fell upon my ledgers, weighed more than a dying star. He would have let me go if the number of 'misplaced' souls was small. A rounding error in the cosmic spreadsheet.
But after conducting the complete audit, he found out that the amount of souls I'd isekai'd were… substantial. To add fuel to an already raging forest fire, some of those bastards I'd sent were now creating utter havoc in their new realms, toppling kingdoms, angering ancient beasts—generally making a mess of my carefully balanced systems.
The Boss was not pleased. The word 'angry' doesn't quite do it justice. It was a cold, silent, all-encompassing rage that warped reality itself. He kicked me out. Stripped me of my power, my form, my very divine nature. At first, I was furious, but what could I do? This whole mess was my own damn fault.
And as punishment, he sent me here. To a world of cultivation. Yes, this fucking cultivation reality, a place even gods fear to be stationed. It's a chaotic, unstable cesspool of martial fanatics obsessed with defying the heavens. A pure, unfiltered law of the jungle. He didn't just fire me; he exiled me to the most miserable project in the portfolio.
And I am sure, with every fiber of my being, that this time the Boss is watching me. Using me as his timepass. Such a beautiful, wretched irony.
"At least they could have given me a decent body," Atrex whispered, the words rasping from a throat raw with disuse. He was lying on the hard, cold ground, staring up at the sky, but the only thing he could see was that blurry, indifferent grey. "Instead of a child who just died because he had nothing to eat or drink."
The gnawing emptiness in his stomach, the brittle feeling of his bones—it was the legacy of starvation. This body wasn't just a child's; it was a wreck, a failed experiment abandoned in a back alley.
He let out a dry, humorless laugh that turned into a painful cough. His vision swam with fresh tears—the body's reflexive response, not his own. He would not cry. Crying was an inefficient emotional response.
The blurriness, however, was a tactical disadvantage.
"Looks like I have to fix these eyes of mine," he murmured, his voice gaining a sliver of the cold authority it once held. "If I want to have anything resembling an easy life."
He lay there for another moment, feeling the last of the previous owner's sorrow fade away, replaced by the slow, rising tide of his own indomitable will. The sorrow was gone, but the anger—no, not anger, but a cold, sharp, professional indignation—remained.
This was unacceptable. The state of this body, the terms of this punishment, the sheer inconvenience of it all. It was a mess.
And Atrex had always been very, very good at cleaning up messes.