The pain surged through Elias like a living entity, a beast with claws of fire and fangs of ice, ripping through his skull from the inside out. He thrashed on the glittering pile of gems, his body convulsing as if struck by lightning.
Raw, primal screams tore from his throat, echoing off the iron bars of the massive cage around him, like the cries of a trapped animal.
His face contorted in agony; skin turned ghostly white while veins bulged at his temples like rivers ready to overflow. Sweat poured down his brow, mingling with tears he hadn't realized he was shedding, stinging his eyes as the world blurred into a haze of red and black.
It felt as if something were drilling into his brain, a relentless bore of white-hot metal grinding through bone and tissue, carving pathways where none existed.
Foreign memories surged like a tidal wave crashing against a crumbling dam: fragments of images, sensations, emotions that were achingly familiar yet utterly alien. A cavernous lair not unlike this one but larger, filled with the scent of sulfur and ancient stone.
The sting of rejection from a brood of gleaming-scaled kin whose cold eyes dismissed him. Hunger not just the gnawing emptiness in his stomach but a deeper void, a starvation of the soul that left him wasting away. And through it all echoed a name: Mal'akhi.
Elias or was he Mal'akhi now?—clutched his head with clawed hands, nails digging into the scaled flesh until blood trickled down his forehead.
The gems beneath him shifted with each thrash, sharp edges biting into his back; yet physical pain paled in comparison to this mental onslaught.
Memories flashed faster: soaring through storm-clouded skies on underdeveloped wings only to crash to earth in exhaustion; begging for scraps from others who sneered at his "defective" form; isolation within this very cave, a personal prison he built himself masquerading as a hoard, where he had curled atop crystals hoping their faint Essence would sustain him.
But it hadn't. His body had withered away just like Elias's own had on Earth, starved not for food but for vital force.
Time lost all meaning amid this torment. Was it minutes? Hours? An eternity compressed into an unending moment? Elias's screams devolved into hoarse whimpers as he curled into a fetal position among the treasures.
The memories weren't mere information; they carried weight, emotions crashing over him like waves: bitterness at being born an anomaly, rage at indifference from others, profound loneliness mirroring his life in that filthy apartment back home.
He saw, the this body final days: lying here too weak to move while the gems' glow dimmed as life ebbed away quietly into darkness, a fading reminiscent of Elias's own collapse.
And then... nothing. Until now.
The drilling sensation reached a peak, a final, searing crescendo that felt like a blade twisting in his mind. Then, just as abruptly as it had started, it faded away. The pain ebbed, leaving behind a dull throb that pulsed with his heartbeat.
Elias lay sprawled on the gems, his breathing ragged and labored. Each inhale felt like drawing fire into his lungs, scorching the delicate tissues but oh, how sweet the air tasted, crisp and infused with a faint mineral tang from the cavern.
It was as if he had been drowning and had finally surfaced, gulping life back into his starved body.
Exhilaration flooded through him, mingling with the residual pain in a dizzying cocktail. His muscles tingled with newfound vitality, as if memories had unlocked something dormant within him.
He pushed himself up on shaking arms, claws scraping against the crystals with a musical chime. The world came into sharper focus: iron bars of the cage etched with faintly glowing runes pulsing like a heartbeat; vast darkness beyond hinting at an enormous underground hall; and beneath him lay a hoard of gems, a king's ransom, now humming with subtle energy as if responding to his presence.
He closed his eyes to steady the whirlwind in his mind. Memories settled slowly, piecing themselves together like shards of glass reforming into a mosaic.
Half an hour passed—or was or was it longer? Time felt elastic here, stretched by alien sensations coursing through him. When he finally opened his eyes, an expletive escaped his lips raw and vehement.
"What the hell? Holy shit... what kind of deep trouble have I gotten myself into?"
His voice reverberated in the cave, deeper than before, with an undercurrent of draconic rumble that vibrated in his chest. Sitting up fully now, his tail, lashed behind him in agitation and scattering gems across the ground with a clatter.
Weakness filled his entire body. His limbs trembled under effort; muscles atrophied from whatever starvation this body had endured before now made him feel light-headed, as though one wrong move might send him crumpling back down again.
"Okay, calm down," he muttered to himself while forcing deep breaths. "I died, a pathetic loser gooning myself to death and now... this?"
He flipped through his memories again, this time more deliberately, like scrolling through a mental archive. The body he is currently in belongs to Mal'akhi, a name that resonated with an unsettling familiarity, as if it had always been his.
With these foreign memories in his brain, he confirmed one thing: he have indeed died while gooning and got reincarnated but he reincarnated into the body of a dragon.
Mal'akhi was no ordinary dragon. Born in a hidden lair deep within the Primordial Dragon Domain, a vast underground realm teeming with ancient draconic clans, he was an anomaly from the very beginning.
The Nine Ancestral Dragon Bloodlines, dominated the dragon race; their purity dictated strength, status, and survival. But Mal'akhi was born outside all nine: a freak mutation whose bloodline bore the taint of abyssal essence from some forgotten cataclysm.
From hatchling days onward, he was shunned. His siblings with pure affinities and higher bloodline purity grew rapidly while devouring Essence-rich treasures and evolving under the guidance of Elder Dragons.
Mal'akhi couldn't keep up. Normal cultivation methods, meditating in Essence Veins, consuming Essence Stones, hibernating for centuries, yielded nothing for him.
His body rejected it all, he wasted away despite being surrounded by a hoard of gems and crystals that his clan had left him as a "mercy." This cave wasn't a prison; it was a quarantine, a place to let the defective one die without tainting the bloodline.
The memories carried emotional weight: the sting of rejection from his broodmother as she turned away with cold eyes; the mockery of his kin who called him "the Void's Bastard"; and the endless hunger not for food but for something deeper, a vital force his body craved yet couldn't grasp.
Mal'akhi had curled up on this very pile of gems pulsing with untapped Essence and starved slowly into oblivion, mirroring Elias's own end in that filthy apartment.
Elias—now Mal'akhi—let out a bitter laugh that echoed off the bars surrounding him. "A loser in life and now a loser in death," he scoffed. "Reincarnated into another pathetic failure. Great. Just fucking great."
The parallels struck him hard: on Earth, he'd wasted away in isolation addicted to digital highs while starving both body and soul; here too was Mal'akhi's story of rejection and inability to cultivate like others did. Was this karma? Some cosmic joke? Or fate handing him a second chance in a body that mirrored all his flaws?
He stood unsteadily, his tail instinctively balancing him as it swayed to counter his wobbling. Flexing his claws, he felt their sharpness and took cautious steps across the gem hoard.
The crystals hummed beneath him, sending a faint vibration up his legs, Essence, calling out to him. He picked up a sapphire larger than his fist and crushed it in his palm. Shards dug into his skin, but a rush of sweet, invigorating energy flowed in. The weakness dissipated further; his vision sharpened, and a subtle strength filled his muscles.
"This... this is what he needed," Elias murmured as the pieces began to fit together.
Mal'akhi's memories confirmed it: the dragon had tried consuming the gems before, but his body couldn't process them. Now, with Elias's soul fused within him, something had changed.
The hunger remained but felt more... directed, focused. He devoured another crystal, a ruby this time, crunching it like candy. Warmth spread through his veins as the pain in his head faded to a dull throb.
Although he can feel that the hunger was subsiding but at the same it was not. He couldn't explain this kind of weird feeling at all.
Emboldened, he approached the cage bars again. The runes pulsed with warning energy, but he pressed a palm against one anyway, ignoring the initial shock that coursed through him.
As he was pondering over these thoughts, a faint chime echoed in his ear, it sounded like a distant bell ringing inside his head. It grew louder and more insistent until it vibrated through his skull.
[ Primordial Dragon Harem System System..Activated.]
Mal'akhi's eyes widened as time seemed to freeze around him.