Hey there... I just did something huge, and I need your help.
I just uploaded my first novel, so if you could give it a read, it would me the world to me.
The name is 'Reborn in a Noble 'Gangster' House'
By; 'The_Crucible_One'
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How long has it been?
Akira thought. Not asked it, but thought it. Because his voice was long gone.
The endless, cycling, unbreakable pain has taken his voice.
How long had he been suspended in the grip of the yin-yang looking thing? How long had the red flames been burning his skin and the blue flames been healing it? How long had his body been unmade and remade, destroyed and rebuilt, killed and resurrected in a loop that had no beginning he could remember and no end he could see?
Minutes?
Hours?
Days?
He had no idea. Time didn't exist here. The void had no sun to track, no shadows to measure, no clock on the wall to glance at. There was only the cycle.... burn, heal, burn, heal. Repeating with a rhythm that had become as constant and as meaningless as a heartbeat.
At some point the pain had changed.
Not decreased. Not softened. Changed.
Akira had become numb.
Not immune. The burning was still there. The healing was still there. His nerves still fired. His skin still blistered and closed and blistered again. The sensation was identical to what it had been at the start — the same intensity, the same heat, the same cycle of destruction and restoration.
But his reaction to it had changed. The screaming had stopped. The struggling had stopped. The desperate, animal desire to escape had faded into something quieter. Something that resembled, if not acceptance, then at least exhaustion deep enough to mimic it.
Burn.
Heal.
Burn.
Heal.
Continue.
What is the meaning of this?
He floated in the arms of his own flames, his body a canvas for a painting that was being erased and redrawn in an infinite loop, and he thought.
He looked at the structure in front of him — the yin-yang, the massive construct of red and blue, still spinning, still burning, still radiating the full, unrestrained potential of his power. The thing that had spoken to him.
"To know the flame, you must feel the flame."
What does it mean?
He had been feeling the flame. For however long he had been here, he had done nothing but feel the flame. It had burned him. It had healed him. It had wrapped around every inch of his body and introduced itself to his nervous system with the intimacy of a lover and the cruelty of a torturer.
He had felt it. He was feeling it right now. What more was there to feel?
Feel.
The word repeated in his head.
Not "endure." Not "survive." Not "resist."
Feel.
There was a difference. And Akira, suspended in the void with his skin burning and healing and burning again, finally understood what it was.
He had been resisting.
From the moment the arms had grabbed him, he had been fighting. Not physically.
His mind had been rejecting the pain, pushing against it, building walls between his consciousness and the sensation, trying to separate himself from what was happening to his body.
That was natural. That was what bodies did. Pain was a signal to stop, to retreat, to protect. Every nerve in his body was wired to resist damage. Every instinct he possessed was screaming at him to fight, to escape, to survive.
But the voice hadn't said "survive the flame."
It had said "feel the flame."
And feeling required the opposite of resistance.
Akira made a choice.
He let go.
He stopped resisting.
He let the hands tighten.
He let the burning burn him.
He let the healing heal him.
Not endured. Not survived. Let. Allowed. Welcomed. Opened the door that he had been pressing his back against and said: come in.
The flames responded.
The moment his resistance dropped, the flames changed. Not in intensity. In depth. They had been burning his skin. Now they went deeper.
Not burning now. Not healing. Something else. Something that didn't have a word because it existed in a space between destruction and creation that no language had ever needed to describe.
The flames entered his bloodstream. He could feel them — not as heat, not as pain, but as presence. Moving through his veins the way blood moved, circulating through his body with the slow, deliberate rhythm of a tide coming in. Reaching his organs. His lungs. His heart. His brain.
Deeper.
And deeper.
And deeper.
Past the physical. Past the biological. Past the quirk factor and the flame output spectrum and the medical scans that Nezu's team had measured and catalogued and filed away.
Into something beneath all of that. The place where his flames began.
The spark that existed before the body, before the quirk, before the name. The thing that Aurelia had called "a fragment of Life itself."
The flames reached it.
And merged.
The separation disappeared. The boundary between Akira and the fire dissolved.
No boy was holding a flame.
There was no flame being held by a boy.
There was one thing. Unified.
His body began to change.
On a cellular level. The kind of change that happened at a level so deep that no scanner could detect it and no eye could see it.
His cells accepted the flame as part of their structure. His nerves rewired to process heat not as external stimulus but as self-generated signal. His muscles integrated thermal energy into their contraction patterns. His blood carried fire the way it carried oxygen.
And in the void, suspended in the arms of a construct that was no longer separate from him, Akira asked himself the questions one final time.
What is flame?
The answers came. Not from the construct. Not from Aurelia. From himself. From the place where the merge had happened, where the boundary had dissolved, where the boy and the fire had become one thing.
Flame is what takes life. It reduces things to ashes. Sends them back to the ground. It is the end of what was.
Flame is what gives life. Its warmth. Its care. The heat that lets seeds grow. The light that guides the lost.
Flame is death.
Flame is life.
They are not opposites. They are the same thing, seen from different angles. The red and the blue. The yin and the yang. Destruction and creation. Not enemies. Partners. Two halves of a whole that had been separated by the limitations of a human body and the framework of a world that needed things to be categorised.
But I am not categorised.
I am not a quirk.
I am not a tool.
I am not a boy who uses fire.
His eyes opened... And they were not crimson.
They were not purple.
They were flame.
I am the flame.
And the world went white.
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Early chapter here, I know a bit short but it was needed to be this way.
Anyway look forward to the next chapter😁 Like I said, at 12am Beijing time