Reincarnated as the Final Villain's Vessel

Chapter 283: Broken Images

The Dark God died before the Fire Bearer, just as the Fire Bearer died by its hand, but its blood still lives in the veins of its brothers... its children now!

And as its ichor flowed through their veins, the echo of its presence resonated among them, granting them strength, desire and the glory to conquer the stars.

That’s why it called itself the Dark God, even when its life was cut short its consciousness still existed somewhere, waiting for its glorious awakening... and with it the One from Beyond the End would return above them to reclaim what remained its own.

Even over the past hundreds of years, it never stopped supplying its people with power, because it knew that just as it hadn’t died, neither had the Fire Bearer.

That soul which received the grace of wishes didn’t perish, it shattered and scattered among its own kind, reborn across the centuries and dying young each time.

Why?

Because every wish carries a price.

...

Black.

A black void stretched around me in every direction as I floated in it, drifting quietly through the eternal silence... it was comfortable.

But I wasn’t alone.

Across the empty expanse thousands of stars were scattered, I couldn’t count them... some were bright and shining, others faint and barely there, and a few were huge and brilliant.

All of them shared one thing, threads... many of them stretched from the small and large stars to meet at one point in front of me, the point I was slowly drifting toward.

It was a star too... not the biggest and not the smallest, somewhere in between.

It was pale, its light dull and broken, small sparks flew from its wounded surface, glittering in the void before vanishing, as if it was about to vanish too.

Maybe it couldn’t hold all those threads... they were heavy for a simple soul stretched across the Sea of Souls.

But more important than all that.

Who am I?... what am I?

Some images flashed in my head, faint, weak and distant, as if coming through countless walls.

A creature born near the walls the Oldest Dream had built, lucky enough to find its way out of that world, and roam reality in the form of a purple light.

It created dreams and fed on those who dreamed them, then one day it found itself trapped in a small place... very small, with eyes staring at it like it was just a mad beast.

It was angry.

So, when the barrier around it broke, it spread out and swallowed everything nearby into its embrace.

A seed carried by a little girl who planted it in her small home, deep inside a fortress of armored concrete home to tens of thousands of people.

Because their world was collapsing, and its surface had filled with terrifying monsters, the people were afraid.

And the seed loved fear... fear was delicious... and nightmares were even more delicious.

The seed fed on their fear and became a small flower that brought joy to the child’s face, and nightmares to her nights.

Whenever someone slept the flower bloomed inside their dreams, feeding on their despair and nurturing it, until every resident of the fortress had become fertilizer for its wicked soul.

An egg hatched under the ice, and out crawled a disgusting creature that devoured its dead mother’s body, then its siblings who were late to hatch.

In the cold, icy chamber it grew bigger and bigger, then it came out and hunted, then grew more, until it became the apex predator among the ice dunes.

Everyone who heard its voice echo ended up as its dinner.

To me the images were broken, faint and very short, each one lasting a single moment before it changed.

Then there was a dark-skinned boy, born in a city of beautiful white stone in the middle of a stone maze in the desert... those were dark times, full of red and the heavy smell of blood.

Every day was a new hell, but in the middle of hell there was hope.

She was beautiful and strong, and for some reason her name sounded like the name of the old city... she was their hope, so he couldn’t help but admire her.

One day, when she made the decision to evacuate the city and search for a way out of this world, he decided he had to tell her at least, before they died... or before he died.

Maybe after she finished her speech in front of the tired residents, but the speech never ended.

He watched the sky shatter like a simple mirror, and darkness pour through it to consume their world... but threads appeared from the air above them and tied them to a strange being.

Then everything was blurry.

Life was like the echoes of a distant tune, while the pale, weak star came closer, until I saw those threads sinking into its broken depths.

The closer I got, the clearer the memories I carried, and unlike the earlier ones they were more alive.

Born into one of the highest stations in the known universe, I saw a lot... even before I turned seven... I witnessed and learned many things, vast and awe-inspiring.

People who could shake continents, weapons that erase nations and races with a mere wish.

An army of black obsidian giants stood along the Great Continent, guarding the nation they’d been made for... their bodies stretched for kilometers until their heads almost touched the clouds, their limbs strong enough to tear apart ancient monsters and carve mountains.

They were a weapon too... prosperity and knowledge were a given to me.

But things changed when the mist touched me, I was no longer who I was... even though my last name was known throughout all of existence, its very concept was taken from me... strange?

Ignorant and small, I forgot even who I was, in filthy rooms I was starved and forced to fight, I killed and was almost killed.

They took me, strapped me to that primitive technology, and injected strange, unknown things into me... maybe they themselves didn’t know exactly what those compounds were.

They were trying to improve my body and reach my soul... so I’d carry more potential and gain new things, even if the price was the lives of hundreds of children.

Fools.

How dare they.

How dare these backward creatures tamper with me, improve me?... can perfection be improved?... no, it can’t.

But it can be corrupted... like they did to me.

Years of vile, ignorant experiments... then I changed again.

I saw a strange life, I was just a tired young man working in a world even more backward than this one, playing a game on an old device, and it looked like my future, no, it was my future.

Then with that knowledge I learned I was a vessel for the being that destroyed everything I loved, I hated those humans in front of me, pure hatred grew inside me toward them.

How could they betray humanity... what lowly, wicked, stupid creatures.

When I escaped, I saw a new world, Empires built on a false history, just a distorted reflection of the past.

I met new people, I’d seen them through that old screen and then in front of me, we ended up in some trouble and were moved to a strange place, and there I saw one of the obsidian giants.

The strange thing is it was alive... how could our ancient weapon be alive, and a great monster on top of that... strange?

It even almost killed me.

But I escaped to the same world I’d seen in the memories, only a more extreme version of it... I killed a man who was the puppet of an Ancient monster, then helped a woman remember her origin, and burn her city with everything in it.

I killed a beautiful flower that bloomed on nightmares, then an Evil monster that had built its nest among the ice above our target.

Deep beneath the earth I saw incomplete images of the past, and familiar letters, letters I learned when my hand was still soft and small.

When my mother ran her hand gently and warmly over my head, the knowledge was carving itself into my mind... the impossible? I didn’t know what that was back then.

While she ran her hand through my hair, she was whispering something, her voice bringing comfort to the depths of my soul and making me feel how weak I was.

"Caius... Caius Astroweild, don’t forget."

Huh?... me?

I’d knelt, my limbs severed and my blood staining the sand, my bones trembling and my soul broken by the edge of the sword that wounded it.

A sudden realization crept into me, maybe if I had eyes, I’d have opened them wide right now... but I didn’t have eyes, or a mouth, or hands.

I just existed, drifting among the stars, each of them a soul in its own right, all of them tied to my soul, the center of all this.

My soul that I was drifting toward, slowly breaking apart and about to go out completely.

Shit.

Didn’t I die?... wasn’t I stabbed with a strange dagger?... what was I just rambling about?

I doubted I was really dead, I mean I’m not supposed to be thinking if I’m dead?... right?

When I realized this, the void around me rippled... the black void turned into darkness, real darkness.