---
There was no pain.
That was the first thing Nezha noticed.
No fire.
No tearing.
No drowning weight of Heaven's judgment pressing against his chest.
Only warmth.
Not heat—but the kind of warmth that comes from being held. The kind that seeps into bone and marrow without burning. The kind his mother's arms had carried, once, when he was small enough to fit inside them.
He did not remember dying.
He remembered *choosing*.
He remembered his mother's face—not weeping, not yet, but frozen in that terrible moment between understanding and refusal. He remembered his father's silence, the way Li Jing's hands had trembled at his sides, reaching for nothing because nothing could be reached for.
He remembered the sash tightening around him—not cruelly, but reverently.
He remembered the moment his heart had steadied instead of breaking.
Then—nothing.
A gap.
A held breath that stretched into eternity.
Now, there was light.
Not blinding. Not sharp. Not the cold brilliance of Heaven's judgment or the scorching radiance of divine decree.
A soft glow that pulsed like breath—like something alive, waiting.
Nezha drifted within it, neither asleep nor awake. He had no body—yet he felt whole. Thoughts came slowly, like petals opening one by one, each revealing something he had forgotten he knew.
*So this is death*, he thought.
But death did not answer.
Instead, something stirred around him.
A scent—clean, faintly sweet, achingly familiar.
Lotus.
---
The light condensed.
Petals unfolded—not around him, but *through* him, as if he were the space they were opening into.
From within the glow, shape returned.
First, a spine of warmth—firm, steady, like a promise made in bone. Then limbs, drawn not from flesh but from intent. Blood did not flow; instead, light traced paths where veins should have been, weaving itself into substance, into *being*.
Nezha felt himself being written.
Not rebuilt as he was—
—but rewritten as he had chosen to be.
Each strand of light asked a question. Each fiber of forming muscle waited for an answer. The body did not simply grow; it *listened*, shaping itself around the truths he offered.
*What do you carry forward?*
The memory of his mother's voice, singing him to sleep.
*What do you leave behind?*
The weight of being what Heaven demanded.
*What do you become?*
He did not know yet. But he would find out.
And for the first time, that uncertainty felt like freedom instead of fear.
---
Outside the cocoon of light, Taiyi Zhenren stood unmoving, hands folded within his sleeves.
His eyes were closed, but his awareness extended fully into the ritual—feeling every shift of energy, every tremor of will, every fragile thread holding the miracle together. Sweat gathered at his brow. Not from exertion.
From restraint.
This was the dangerous part.
To resurrect a body was simple. Flesh could be regrown. Bones could be reknit. The physical form was merely pattern repeated, matter remembering its shape.
But to anchor a will—
That was forbidden.
Heaven did not like it when souls returned unchanged. The natural order demanded that death strip something away—memory, self, the stubborn flame of individual choice. Reincarnation was permitted precisely because it erased what came before.
What Taiyi was doing preserved it.
He was returning Nezha to life with his will intact, his memories whole, his defiance unbroken.
If Heaven noticed—truly noticed, not the distant ripple that had already disturbed the celestial courts—there would be consequences.
But Taiyi had already decided those consequences were worth paying.
---
Inside the lotus, Nezha felt something tug at him.
Not force.
*Expectation*.
A pressure that whispered: *define yourself*.
It was not hostile. It was not kind. It simply *was*—the weight of existence demanding an answer before it would allow him to exist again.
For the first time in his life, there was no voice telling him what he was meant to be.
No curse pronounced at his birth.
No prophecy draped across his shoulders.
No divine decree etched into his fate.
Only a question, patient and vast:
*Who are you, now that you are free to answer?*
Nezha reached inward.
He did not grasp for power. He had held power before—held it until it burned his hands, until it consumed everything around him, until the only way to stop hurting others was to stop existing entirely.
He did not seek vengeance. Ao Guang had retreated. The debt was paid. Revenge would only create new debts, new blood, new children standing over the bodies of those they loved.
Instead, he reached for something smaller. Something truer.
He remembered running barefoot through the courtyard, laughing at nothing, at everything, at the sheer absurdity of being alive.
He remembered arguing with his father—not the frozen silence of the end, but the earlier arguments, the ones where Li Jing's voice rose and Nezha's rose higher, and somehow that meant they were both still trying.
He remembered laughing too loudly, too often, as if laughter could fill the spaces where belonging should have been.
He remembered standing alone against the sea—not because he was fearless, not because he was brave, but because someone had to. Because the people behind him could not. Because the only thing worse than dying would have been letting them die instead.
He remembered his mother calling him *bright disaster*.
And meaning it as a blessing.
*I am me*, he thought.
Not what Heaven made.
Not what the world feared.
Not what his father wished he could be.
Just *me*.
Whatever that meant.
Whatever that would become.
The lotus trembled.
---