[Rewrite] Chapter 2: Rebirth

Deep underground, in a cavern large enough to shelter a two-story house, a small temple waited in the dark. The architecture was old, it could be considered a fossil if the cavern dirt added a second layer, its lines were stubborn and simple, refusing the centuries that had swept past. Dust lay in quiet drifts across everything it could claim.

At the center stood an altar that demanded the room’s attention. Twelve feet long, ten wide, with stone steps that invited ceremony, it rose from the floor like a platform meant to sort the worthy from the watching. Set into the riser below, a golden plaque bore a single word in an alphabet the current age had chosen to forget. The ancient still living from that era could read it without effort.

A simple word chosen to project the sinful essence of its unholy grounds.

EAT

The word would have puzzled the pious if not for the banquet laid out along the aisle. Long paths of once luxurious carpet led to the steps, flanked by tables dressed with fine tableware and golden goblets, all buried beneath centuries of dust. Worship and dining had been threaded together here without apology.

Upon the platform, a statue watched over the hall. It was a woman carved from fine marble and hungry intent. Beautiful was the first and last description the eye could hold when gazed at the stony form. A gold crown rested on her head, a single purple gem at its center. Two curved horns broke through marble hair and told the truth of her kind, a devil without a doubt. Chains, bangles, and bracelets of carved metal circled her neck, wrists, and ankles. She sat lotus, elbows on her thighs, both hands lifting a bowl of pure gold. Her head tilted upward as if the sky had pleased her once; her eyes, however, looked down into the bowl with concentrated curiosity, as though the world’s meaning pooled there and nowhere else.

Above her, set into the cavern ceiling, a dark crystal the size of a cannonball bled a sticky, black liquid in a slow, patient drip. The jewel drank light from the room and returned none, the stream had fallen for so long that time had lost track, but even after all this time of steady drips, the bowl never overflowed. The surface accepted more and made room for it, like a lake that had forgotten the concept of edges.

And then, the quiet broke.

The liquid shivered and bounced. Small domes rose and collapsed across its surface, bubbles climbing and bursting without a sound. Hairline fractures spread throughout the crystal overhead. A thin brightness wove through the gold bowl, as if lit from within. Ripples tightened and pushed toward a single point.

And something pushed back.

Suddenly, a small figure broke free, they fought through the syrupy thickness and wrenched to the surface. Air tore into their lungs with the panic of nearly drowning, greedily sucking in new breath. 

“Buuuuwahhh fuc-...cough, cough!”

The child thrashed, swimming in place until instinct found an edge. Small hands caught the bowl’s lip. She hauled herself over, slid, and landed hard on the platform. Black liquid slid off her in ropes and sheets, gathering under her shoulder blades, tracing the length of her spine, pattering down the steps below.

She coughed until the last of the tar taste left her mouth. She blinked against the dim and the dust. Breath by breath, her body recovered itself from the shock.

A girl lay there, perhaps twelve by the frame. Short hair clung to her head in wet curls the color of fresh petals. Two small black horns peeked from the pink. When her eyes opened properly, their irises showed four-petal patterns, pink eyes on black sclera, rotating slowly around a steady pupil. Cute and unsettling were both correct and insufficient for the sight.

Beneath the glaze of black liquid, six, similarly black set of stars sat on her upper back, arranged in a perfect ring. The marks were clean and quiet the way a tattoo can be when the ink dries exceptionally.

She shivered and sat up, arms crossed tight over a chest that had nothing to warm it. The room gave her cold stone, old wood, and a silent ceremony without any people. Tables, silverware, goblets, and an altar. An elegantly abandoned temple now surrounded her, bleeding into her blurry vision.

“Where is this? cough,” she whispered, her voice shaky, “w-what happened to me?”

She turned and met the statue’s gaze. The woman in stone wore a crown with a purple gem at its center and lifted a golden bowl with the same reverence Tavja had used to cling to its rim. From this angle the statue seemed to be… studying her, not the bowl. The startling attention was a weight on the top of Tavja’s skull. It made her bones want to collapse and fold.

She spun around and slapped her own cheeks instead. 

Smack! Smack!

Once, then twice. The sting walked her back from the edge of madness.

“Come on, Tav,” she told herself, her high pitch voice strong, small jaw set. “be a fucking woman!”

Behind her, the statue’s eyes were no longer fixed on the bowl. They watched the girl with a curious gaze, as if sight had returned to stone out of boredom. When Tavja looked back again, the gaze had resumed its proper place with embarrassed haste.

Tavja didn’t notice that as her mind raced.

Memory began to gather itself like a reluctant fog. A kitchen. A toaster. A fork. A string of messages from an unknown number. The careless way electricity wrote a sudden ending. Then a blank. Then black liquid. Then now.

‘Did… I die?’

She held the thought in her mouth and didn’t spit it out. Instead she looked at her hands, ones she didn’t recognize. They were small, slender, the nails clean even under the tar. The skin was a pale olive rather than the ruby red she had lived with. Was she now a human? A weakling?... or something close to it?

Fear pricked the back of her mind, and then went away as she pushed it down with all the denial and bigotry she could muster. She swiftly went to the nearest table, took a gold plate from a setting, and wiped the dust until it caught a decent reflection.

A pale faced girl looked back at her instead of a ruby red woman. Delicate face. Small nose. Lips that had to be called pretty, even at such an age. Petaled eyes over black. Short pink hair shedding the last of the liquid in thin threads. But the small black horns at her hairline is what put wild joy where fear had tried to live.

She wasn’t some weak human, no, she was more. Much more.

A devil. The horns and sclera said it all.

She laughed. It came out bright and bell-like, light enough to prickle the dust in the air. It filled the temple with a new kind of sound. The pieces in her mind all snapping together.

This temple. The statue. The black devil horns tinged red with racial superiority. 

“Hahaha! Of course,” she said to the reflection, still laughing. “Of course.”

Neel. The name arrived with recognition deeper than language. A world she had memorized through screens and sleeplessness. She turned the plate, angled it for an awkward back view, and found what she had already felt with the corner of her attention. Six stars in a perfect ring on her upper back.

‘And I’m a supreme!’ She laughed louder at the sight. The petals in her eyes shifted slightly, rotating a fraction of a degree.

Yes. She was in Neel, and she was a devil. An apex existence.

A devil with six stars. An apex of the apex in this vast world.

Aside from the six stars meaning maximum potential, six stars showed the favor of the world's laws. Six promises from the platform of chaos. Six requests. Six wishes.

In Neel, angels and devils were as close to godhood as anything dared claim. Both carried strength and speed that made human metrics a joke. Both swam in seas of mana and climbed high with mountains with chi. Angels carried a tool named ‘bless magic’ that did not simply buff but continued so long as will and essence didn’t quit. Devils carried ‘contract magic’ that let growth be written into promises and bound to the soul. The elites layered more frightening privileges on top of those foundations.

Most bloodlines in devils, like herself, also bore a unique inheritance: Wish Magic. Each filled star meant a wish that could be formed and paid for. But wishes had rules. The body could not hold an ocean if it was a cup. A wish that stepped on the neck of a supreme law would not only fail to resolve, but erase the wisher as punishment. But within the possible, the possible was larger than most minds could be trusted to hold.

She traced the star ring with her eyes through the plate, cataloguing the new truth like a patient clerk, remembering the two major rules. Wishing above the limit kills the wisher. Using all of her six means mortality. She accepted this and filed it back in her mind.

Her shoulders loosened. Years of moving through a life that could be measured and rarely surprising, now came forward as a study in contrast. Here, chaos had a curriculum she had already read once. It asked for more than scheduling, and replied to more than networking. Wealth could be gathered. Power could be made. Influence could be defined as more than being seen by random strangers.

‘Didn’t I just die and step directly into heaven?’

Tears of pure joy rose in her eyes. She had wanted something like this with the quiet hunger of a person who has taught herself to want nothing. Now, she didn’t care about where this temple was, how dangerous her situation could be, or if all of this was a coma induced fantasy. It all fell away before the feeling that this was real enough to be worth holding on to.

‘Fantasies, huh?’ She thought.

A silhouette slid smoothly to the front of her mind. Tall. Regal. A devil with a face cut for duty and denial. She made a small, involuntary sound at the back of her throat.

“Hehehe.” The chuckle was strange, a little goofy, and without a doubt… mildly unsettling.

Her irises turned a little more, creaking clockwise for half an inch.

‘W-well,’ she thought in the empty hall, and let herself smile too wide. ‘If they all won’t appreciate you here, you won’t mind if I have you all to myself…right, Vainglory?’

Sixth Vainglory. A six star devil, genius among geniuses, feared, studied, then reduced by betrayal. In the main story line he had been a brief apparition, a simple dungeon ghost in the shell of a devil to explain another man’s gift. He had been harvested for organs, abilities, and the memory that bloodlines call wisdom. The protagonist that encountered him didn’t even grant him the courtesy of a direct end. He had let a lover finish the work because his own strength was lacking, and a convenient mercy had appeared. The mercy? Vainglory hesitated before a face that echoed an old companion from the past. And that face was worn by the lover of the enemy in front of him.

‘What he didn’t know,’ Tavja recited to herself with the satisfaction of a scholar returning to a thesis, ‘was that the companion belonged to the conspiracy that ended him, and the lover who struck the final blow descended from that line. The angel Piety’s line. And she watched history erase Vainglory with a clean conscience.’

She had read the side story arc until her scroll hand went raw. It was in a separate book, low traffic and information dense in the way that makes people skim through and pretend. Those who read it often held the same shallow lesson posted in relevant forums. It was simply cooperation with all races against the Void Tide. And his collateral ‘death’ was a necessary betrayal to keep the song from burning through the rest of the plane. 

But she had taken another meaning from it all, one the text spilled without many really catching.

They feared him.

He didn’t actually travel with companions. He traveled with wardens. Every hero, alpha, guardian, and empyrean on the path carried a spell or skill meant to keep his rise within reach of a mortal mind.

She snorted at the information.

‘Hmph! But I’m here now.’

Arrogance arrived easily, and so did resolve. She was a six-star. She would evolve. She carried knowledge other natives did not have, and if knowledge is a weapon, she would enjoy the fit of it in her hand. She pictured a cold profile. She pictured standing beside it. She laughed at herself with giddy expectation.

She took a large napkin from the table and scrubbed the last of the black liquid from her skin. She then wrapped a tablecloth around her frame and knotted it at the shoulder, then used the gold plate again as a mirror to comb her fingers through short hair. The face looking back was prettier than she was willing to admit out loud. 

‘Quite the femme fatale.’ she thought, then flinched at her own vanity and let the grin widen anyway.

‘Now, the timeline and location.’

The statue in the lotus posture offered both. This was a devil temple. The crown, bowl, and purple gem marked the Queen of Feasts, 1st Gula. No temples to the primordial seven were supposed to exist outside Hellnia, at least not openly. If Gula’s shrine sat here in stone and silence, Hellnia still stood. That meant the second arc hadn’t arrived yet. The one that begins with Hellnia’s complete destruction was still waiting its turn.

She dried pink hair in small, efficient handfuls, mind running sums and cross-indexing lore. As she lowered the plate from her face, an angle caught a detail her eyes would have missed head-on.

The statue’s head had just turned. Not by much, just enough to be addressed in a conversation that had not been invited. The gaze was no longer on the bowl. It had shifted to study the girl standing in the borrowed tablecloth.

If not for the plate’s reflection and a sense of the world that felt newly sharpened, she wouldn’t have noticed. Every hair across her body stood on end, her heartbeat changed cadence, and cold sweat beaded on her brow.

She was being watched!