"So that's it. Shree Yan, your life is not darker than mine." Shree Yan sighed, the sound low and tired, more breath than voice. "But your story will be sad for others. Not for me."
Outside, the afternoon light filtered weakly through thin paper screens, casting pale rectangles across the wooden floor of his room. Dust drifted lazily through the beams, undisturbed, as though even the air itself moved slower here than it had on the battlefield of his previous life.
The clan's name was the Magar clan, though its true name was the Rana Magar clan. Over the years, people had simplified it, a small mercy for outsiders who struggled with the older tongue, though Shree Yan suspected the shortened name had cost something in the process, some weight it once carried.
A dull ache began spreading slowly beneath his ribs, tightening with each breath. The cause was simple enough: before this life, he had swallowed a Rana. In Nepali, राना, "Rana," simply meant king. But in this world, a rana was something else entirely: a worm.
Not an ordinary one. A magical creature, one that even now writhed faintly somewhere inside him, a presence he could feel the way a person feels a held breath, pressing quietly against the inside of his chest.
A king carried vast knowledge, and so did this creature: a rana capable of reading and transferring knowledge directly into a human mind.
Among the Rana world's rarest treasures were ten legendary artifacts, weapons, and creatures, most lost to time now, buried beneath centuries of war and ambition, their names surviving only in fragments of old scrolls and older memories.
Shree Yan sat on the bed, the wooden frame creaking softly beneath his weight, the sheets pooling around his legs. He closed his eyes, let his breathing slow into something deliberate and measured, and turned his focus inward.
He gathered his willpower and worked to stabilize the rana, sweat beading faintly along his hairline despite the cool air drifting through the cracked window. The creature twisted sharply inside him, alive and resistant, refusing at first to settle.
An hour later, he finally succeeded. He exhaled slowly as the ache in his stomach faded to a dull, distant throb, his shoulders loosening for the first time since he'd sat down.
Knock, knock.
Someone rapped on the door, the sound sharp against the quiet. "Coming," Shree Yan called, his voice steady again, betraying none of the effort of the last hour.
A girl stepped into the room, her footsteps light against the floorboards. She looked at him with a joyful smile, one that reached her eyes just enough to seem convincing.
She crossed to the bed, silk sleeves brushing softly against her sides, and sat down, the mattress shifting slightly under the added weight. She was the same age as Shree Yan. In her hands she carried a small wooden bucket, water sloshing gently near the rim with each movement, still warm from wherever she'd drawn it. She claimed she'd brought it because he wanted to wash his face, her smile never wavering, practiced and warm as spring sunlight.
In his previous life, she had tried to seduce him after his mother's death, and failed. In this life, she would fail again, though she didn't know that yet. Something in the stillness of his gaze might have warned a more careful observer.
She was a spy planted by Niang Ming. She held no real feelings for Shree Yan; she simply saw him as a tool for raising her own standing, and her family's. This was the same room where, in his past life, he had locked himself away for three years after his mother's death. In this life, only one month had passed since his reincarnation, a coincidence that was, in truth, no coincidence at all.
Crack.
The sound was small, almost delicate, like a dry branch snapping underfoot in winter. Shree Yan snapped her neck, and she was dead before the smile had even fully left her lips, her body slumping sideways against the sheets, the bucket tipping and spilling a thin stream of water across the wooden floor. He showed no emotion. His gaze stayed cold and calm as he watched the water spread slowly outward, catching the last of the afternoon light.
Servants held no real value to him, nothing more than trash to be discarded. And this one had tried to kill him, the future patriarch of the clan, which made her fate, in his eyes, entirely deserved and entirely unremarkable.
His lips curled into a faint smile as he rose from the bed, stepping carefully around the spreading water. "Niang Ming, if you want to play games with me, remember this: I will not be your challenger. I will be the master, and you will be the one challenging me." Seven hundred years of a demon's cunning sat behind those words. He was a master. Niang Ming was nothing more than a child standing in front of him.
Shree Yan stepped onto the window ledge and looked down, the cool stone beneath his bare feet a welcome contrast to the warm, still air of the room behind him. Below lay a garden filled with beautiful flowers, chrysanthemums and pale peonies swaying gently in the wind, their petals catching brief flashes of gold as the clouds shifted overhead. Yet in one quiet corner of that beauty, half-hidden beneath the roots of an old plum tree, there was a small, dark hole in the ground.
A rat crawled out, whiskers twitching, fur matted along one side as though it had recently escaped some other danger.
Moments later, a snake slithered from the same hole, scales dark and glistening faintly in the afternoon light, its cold eyes locked onto its prey with an intensity that seemed almost patient. The rat ran.
It ran desperately, its small body trembling, claws scrabbling frantically against packed dirt as it pushed itself beyond its limits. For two or three minutes it fought for its life, darting between the roots of flowering shrubs, refusing to give up even as its breath came in short, panicked bursts.
But after twenty-seven steps, its body suddenly stopped, legs giving out beneath it as though some invisible weight had finally settled fully onto its small frame.
Silence.
Even the wind, for a moment, seemed to still.
The snake caught up and swallowed it whole, the motion swift and utterly without ceremony. Its destiny had ended there, a small ripple of disturbed grass the only remaining evidence that anything had happened at all. Shree Yan watched quietly from the window ledge, his expression unreadable, one hand resting lightly against the wooden frame.
"In this world, weakness is a sin," he murmured, his voice barely louder than the breeze moving through the garden below. "The weak do not choose their fate. They become part of someone else's."
He turned away from the window, a faint shadow crossing his eyes, the light catching briefly on the sharp line of his jaw before he stepped back into the room, careful again to avoid the water still pooling near the bed.
That disappointment was not only for the rat, but for all living things. If life is nothing but suffering for the powerless, he thought, pausing beside the body now cooling on his sheets, then what is the meaning of living like this?
He stood very still in the quiet room, the only sound the faint drip of water reaching the edge of the floorboard and falling, drop by drop, onto the stone beneath.
Then his gaze hardened, something settling behind his eyes that had not been there a moment before. No. Dying is not the answer. If this world devours the weak, then I will become someone it cannot devour.
Outside, the wind picked up once more, carrying the scent of crushed grass and distant rain, and somewhere beyond the garden wall, a bird called out once into the stillness before falling silent again.