The world ended millions of years before Esu was born, and no one bothered to tell the survivors.
The Ancestral Deities had ruled as tyrants of creation: Ṣàngó hurling thunder like judgments, Yemoja drowning continents in maternal rage, Ògún forging chains for gods and men alike. They built humanity from clay, breath, and stolen starlight, then grew bored. The Primordial Cataclysm lasted nine days long enough for every god to die screaming, short enough for their corpses to rot into geography.
What remained were echoes.
Bloodlines thinned like watered palm wine.
Relics shattered into fragments that could ignite a mortal soul or burn it to ash.
Three Àṣẹ Cores, the hearts of dead gods, buried so deep only madmen dug for them.
Humanity called this the Post-Divine Era.
They were wrong.
It was the Scavenger Era.
And Esu had just become its hungriest rat.
He opened his eyes to pain older than his new body.
Mud walls. The copper reek of blood. A hut that smelled of goat shit and desperate prayers. The original Esu nineteen years of hunger, pitch-black skin stretched over bones, amber eyes too clever for a village that fed on scraps had died hours ago. Gutted by raiders seeking a Fear Shard hidden in the elder's shrine.
The new Esu sat up slowly, testing ligaments that felt borrowed. Memories flooded in like sewage: a modern Earth life of boardroom executions, a car wreck on rain-slicked highways, death as a doorway. Then this. A body with zero bloodline resonance. Lifespan: perhaps eighty-one years if the pox didn't take him first.
He smiled. The expression felt foreign on this face, like wearing a dead man's skin.
Perfect.
No crutches. No golden finger. No hidden ancestry waiting to awaken. Just a mind sharpened on corporate betrayal and the cold mathematics of survival. In his old world, he'd ruined lives with smiles and stock options. Here, the currency was blood and divine scraps.
Esu stood. A cracked bronze mirror showed a boy who looked seventeen lean muscle from chronic hunger, cheekbones sharp enough to cut lies, eyes that reflected nothing. Handsome enough to trust. Forgettable enough to kill.
He dressed in the dead boy's rags and stepped into dawn.
Akure Village sprawled like a scab on the earth: three hundred souls clinging to the Oyo Enclave's outer fringe. Mud huts clustered around a shrine to Obatala, its clay head split by lightning no one remembered. Children chased chickens through dust. Old women pounded millet and pretended the world wasn't ending one forgotten god at a time.
Kofi found him first the wiry hunter with a wind affinity so thin it barely stirred leaves.
"Esu?" Kofi's voice cracked. "The raiders… we thought you were"
"Dead," Esu finished, voice calm as deep water. "I was. Briefly."
Kofi's eyes darted to the scars on Esu's arms raider blades that should have ended him. "They took the shard. Jide's clan. Òya blood, thick as storm clouds. They'll be at the Storm Cliffs by nightfall."
Esu's mind raced, cold and precise.
• Twelve raiders. Jide at Fear Realm (Echo stage).
• Terrain: narrow paths, high winds, vertical drops.
• Resources: one rusted dagger, three poison berries, and a brain that had orchestrated hostile takeovers worth empires.
• Objective: the Fear Shard. First step on the Divine Path. 99% mortality rate for bloodless trash.
He nodded once. "Thank you, Kofi."
Then he walked away.
Kofi shouted after him "You're mad! They'll skin you alive!" but Esu was already calculating angles of betrayal. The village had sheltered the original boy. They'd mourn him. Useful later, when he needed pawns.
By the time the sun bled across the sky, Esu vanished into the forest.
Eighty-one years.
[Esu's Remaining Lifespan: 81 years, 2 months, 11 days]
The number branded itself across his vision like a promise. A whip. A countdown.
He moved through the trees like a shadow learning to kill.
The Storm Cliffs waited ahead, wind screaming through stone like the last breath of a dying goddess.
Twelve raiders.
One shard.
Zero mercy.
Esu's smile returned, sharper now.
The God-Eater's Path began with a debt.
And debts, in this world, were always paid in blood.