History is a lie told honestly.
Or perhaps it is the truth, fractured into shapes the living can endure.
What has passed is never truly gone. What is yet to come has already cast its shadow. In the endless expanse of existence—where stars are born only to rot into silence, where worlds rise and fall like breaths taken by something too vast to notice them—time does not move forward. It folds. It overlaps. It repeats with variation.
Thus, this tale is both ancient and unfolding.
It has already ended.
It is beginning now.
The heavens do not remember names.
They remember weight.
They remember the pressure of wills that refused to bend, the screams of those crushed beneath inevitability, the faint but stubborn echoes of mortals who dared to believe that meaning could be carved from chaos. The heavens are impartial not because they are fair—but because they are indifferent. To them, a king and a beggar are measured by the same scale: what did you force the world to acknowledge?
This is not a story gifted by destiny.
It is a story stolen from it.
The world—all worlds—was never built to be kind. It does not reward virtue. It does not punish cruelty. It does not elevate the righteous nor smite the wicked. It simply exists, vast and uncaring, offering no power freely. Those who rise do so because they bled for every step. Those who fall are not mourned. They are forgotten.
Blood is the only universal language.
Sacrifice, the only currency that never devalues.
Ancestry may open doors, but it does not keep them open. Talent may quicken one's stride, but it does not prevent the fall. Even fate, that convenient fiction whispered by the desperate, bends eventually—if pressed hard enough.
And yet… there are anomalies.
Fractures in the script.
Errors that should not exist.
This tale follows one such error.
A young man who was never meant to be here.
He did not claw his way into legend through prophecy, nor was he chosen by some benevolent cosmic will. He was not summoned by the heavens, nor marked by birth with an inescapable mandate. He arrived because the universe is vast—and even inevitability occasionally miscalculates.
An unseen hand nudged him forward.
Whether that hand belonged to chance, necessity, or something more deliberate… even history does not agree.
He was born twice.
Once, into a world already tired of him.
Once, into a world that would learn to fear him.
In his first life, he learned early that fairness was a myth told by those who had never been hungry. He learned that morality was flexible, loyalty conditional, and survival a matter of perception as much as strength. He learned to read people the way others read weather—anticipating storms long before the clouds gathered.
He died unceremoniously.
No grand last words. No divine revelation. Just a moment of violence, a brief defiance, and silence.
And then—breath.
A second beginning, wrapped in silk and expectation.
They called him a prodigy.
A heavenly child.
A blessing.
They did not know that the mind behind those infant eyes had already lived, already failed, already understood that love could suffocate as easily as hatred could sharpen. They did not know that wisdom gained too early is not a gift—it is a burden that isolates.
From his first breath, the world smiled at him.
And from his first thought, he understood how sharp those smiles could be.
This was a venomous world.
Not because it was cruel—but because it was honest.
Here, flattery preceded betrayal. Praise invited scrutiny. Kindness often concealed ownership. Strength was revered publicly and resented privately. Truth was not something one discovered—it was something negotiated.
And illusion?
Illusion was not deception.
Illusion was survival.
The young man learned this instinctively.
He learned that silence could be louder than declarations. That patience unnerved the arrogant. That power revealed too early was power already being plotted against. He learned that to be underestimated was not an insult—but a shield.
He took his first steps into this world not with fire or thunder, but with restraint.
Others screamed their ambitions to the heavens.
He listened.
Others grasped at destiny like drowning men.
He watched the currents.
Others believed that righteousness would protect them.
He noted how quickly righteousness became a justification for cruelty.
The world tested him—not with catastrophe, but with comfort.
With love that could become leverage.
With privilege that could become a cage.
With expectations that could become a noose.
And slowly, quietly, he accepted a truth many never do:
That there were no pure lies in this world—only incomplete truths.
Every promise contained a loophole.
Every ideal concealed a cost.
Every justice system was merely violence with better posture.
Thus, when he embraced illusion, it was not as a liar—but as a realist.
If truth was a blade, illusion was its sheath.
If truth was fire, illusion was the hand that allowed one to wield it without burning.
The heavens watched.
Not with approval.
Not with disdain.
With interest.
Because while many had walked the path of power, few had done so without delusion. Fewer still had understood that to challenge the heavens was not to rage against them—but to render them irrelevant.
This was not a hero's ascent.
It was not a savior's journey.
It was the rise of someone who understood, from the beginning, that the world does not care who you are—only what you can enforce.
He would begin humbly, yes.
But humility, in his hands, was not submission.
It was concealment.
His steps would be small. His victories understated. His defeats calculated. He would lose when it served him. Retreat when it preserved him. Advance only when the cost-benefit was undeniable.
Some would call him cautious.
Others, cowardly.
Later, they would revise those opinions.
Because tyrants are not always loud.
And the most dangerous ones rarely announce themselves.
This story does not ask whether he was right.
It asks whether the world deserved better.
As he walked deeper into the lattice of power, into systems built on blood and sanctified by tradition, into heavens that claimed order while enforcing stagnation, the question ceased to be whether he would change the world—
And became whether the world would survive the process.
Stars would align and shatter.
Domains would rise and collapse.
Names would be etched into history only to be erased by time.
And somewhere between silence and thunder, between illusion and truth, a mortal would force the cosmos to acknowledge him.
Not because he was chosen.
But because he refused to be ignored.
This is a tale recorded before it happened, and remembered long after it ended.
Of a man who walked into history uninvited—
And rewrote it anyway.
End of Prologue