# I Reincarnated as the Final Boss's Forgotten Son
## Chapter 1: The Funeral
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They held a funeral for me while I was still breathing.
I watched from the doorway.
My father stood before an empty coffin — the Demon Lord who had shattered continents, who had made gods kneel and beg — and said nothing. Not a prayer. Not a curse. Not even my name.
He simply turned away.
That was the moment I understood something the rest of this world hadn't figured out yet.
The most dangerous creature alive isn't the one with the most power.
It's the one everyone forgot to kill.
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My name is Caden Draveth.
Third son of Malachar Draveth. Demon Lord of the Abyssal Throne. Ruler of the Seven Shattered Realms. The single most feared being to have ever drawn breath in recorded history.
And me?
I was the boy they fed twice a day out of legal obligation.
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It started on my third birthday.
Seven court mages pressed their instruments against my chest, waited, and watched the needles stay perfectly still.
No mana signature. No elemental affinity. No demonic resonance.
Nothing.
One of them — old Sethrik, ink-stained fingers, a talent for cruelty — looked at my father and said: *"The child is hollow, my Lord. A vessel with no water. It happens, sometimes, with bloodlines stretched too far."*
My father looked at me once.
Just once.
Then he left the room.
He didn't come back for eleven years.
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I remembered all of this. But the memories weren't originally mine.
Somewhere far away — in a world with electricity and energy drinks and online games that consumed entire years of a life — a twenty-three-year-old named Lee Junho had died in his gaming chair at 3:47 in the morning. Heart failure. Level 99 character on the screen.
That character had been Malachar Draveth.
I had spent six years mastering the Demon Lord class every other player called unplayable. The skill trees were deliberately obscure. The power scaling was brutal in the early game. The lore was buried so deep that most players never found the mechanics that made the class utterly, catastrophically broken at full development.
I had found all of them.
Then I died, and woke up inside the story I knew better than my own life.
Not as the Demon Lord.
As his forgotten son.
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The first week, I thought it was a nightmare.
The second, I accepted it.
By the third, I was taking notes.
The body I'd inherited was in poor shape — malnourished, lungs weak, a cough that rattled like something was loose inside my chest. The previous Caden had been quietly dying for years. The court physician had declared him unlikely to survive the month.
Word reached my father.
My father authorized a funeral to be prepared in advance.
Efficient. Practical. Very much in keeping with the man who had once ended a war by personally executing both sides.
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The funeral was my idea, in a way.
When the servants came to move me to the medical wing, I told them I preferred to rest in my own room. They didn't argue — no one argued about the third son's preferences because no one cared enough to bother.
So I stayed in the east wing.
And while the palace prepared to bury me, I prepared something else entirely.
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It started on day seven.
I had been lying still, cataloguing everything I knew about this world — the game's lore, the hidden mechanics, the power systems — when something shifted at the edge of my vision.
A shimmer. Cold. Silver.
Then letters, floating in the air:
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> **SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE**
> Host identified: Caden Draveth
> Bloodline scan: anomaly detected
> Classification unavailable — all known tiers exceeded
> New classification created: ■■■■■■■■
> Note: information sealed to protect host survival
> Basic interface now available
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I stared at it for a long time.
In the game, the System was a mechanic only the player could see. Characters inside the world couldn't read their own stat windows. Couldn't see skill trees or level notifications or hidden titles.
Except me.
Because I wasn't just Caden Draveth.
I was Lee Junho *inside* Caden Draveth. A player inside the game.
And the System had recognized something in that — something in the bloodline that every court mage had dismissed as empty — and had quietly, privately, started to wake it up.
I opened my status window the way I had ten thousand times before.
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> **STATUS**
> Name: Caden Draveth | Age: 14
> Race: Demon — Abyssal Royal (Dormant)
> Level: 1 | Class: ■■■■■■■■ (Sealed)
>
> STR 4 | AGI 6 | VIT 8 | INT 91 | WIS 88 | ARC ■■■■
>
> Mana: — [Host does not possess a mana core. Host possesses something else entirely. Do not discuss with court mages.]
>
> Titles: The Forgotten (Active) | Hollow-Born (Active) | ■■■■■■■■ (Sealed)
>
> Hidden Passive — Abyss Inheritance (Stage 0/10):
> The Draveth bloodline does not grant mana. It grants something older. Something the world has not seen in four thousand years. Current output suppressed to 0.001% to prevent detection.
> Unsuppressing at current VIT would kill the host.
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I read that last line three times.
*Unsuppressing would kill the host.*
Four weeks later, I stood in the shadow of that doorway watching nobles mill around my empty coffin.
Seven times leveled since then. VIT at thirty-one. Two sealed skills identified. The exact mechanism of my bloodline mapped across six pages of notes.
It wasn't mana.
Mana was borrowed power — energy drawn from the world and shaped by a core. Every mage, demon noble, and divine champion in existence ran on mana. It was the universal currency of power.
What I had was different.
The Draveth bloodline, at its root — before generations of diluted inheritance — didn't borrow from the world.
It consumed it.
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I watched my father stand before my coffin.
His crimson eyes swept the assembled court with the bored authority of a man who had already decided this event was beneath his attention. He turned. Black cape sweeping behind him. Not once looking toward the doorway where his supposedly dying son stood in the shadows.
A notification blinked at the edge of my vision.
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> **TITLE UPDATED**
> The Forgotten → The Sleeping Catastrophe
> You have been mourned before your death. Buried before your end. Discarded by the blood that made you.
> The world has made its position clear.
> Prove it wrong.
> Effect: +15% to all hidden stat growth. Permanent.
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I let myself smile. Just slightly.
The court mage Sethrik — the one who had called me hollow eleven years ago — stood near the coffin, speaking quietly to a noble. As if sensing something, he looked up and scanned the room.
His gaze passed right over the doorway.
Right over me.
I turned and walked back to my room.
I had work to do.
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*They said afterward that the Demon Lord's forgotten son died quietly. A shame, some added, though none of them meant it. He had never amounted to anything. Never shown a single trace of power.*
*They were right.*
*He hadn't shown a single trace.*
*That was the point.*
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*If you enjoyed this chapter, please add to your library and leave a comment! Every stone Caden is building on will matter later — nothing in this story is