I was inhabiting a body I didn't recognize, inside memories I didn't know belonged to me. The air was thick with the smell of parchment glue and old leather, the sting of lime still clinging to my fingertips. In my right hand, I held a lunellum—a crescent knife, curved for cutting parchment with precision—and before me was a soaked sheepskin, stretched taut on a frame, the fibers glistening like wet silk beneath the dim orange light. My hands were older. Calloused. Scars webbed across them like rivers in drought. I wiped the sweat from my brow and felt the sharp crack of something above my temple.

My horn—broken.

The realization came with the sting of a phantom pain.

"Al," a voice called out from the open doorway. The sound was steady, grounded—domestic. "The Fold increased its profits again."

I didn't recognize the speaker.

"Good," I heard myself say in a voice that wasn't mine. It was deeper, rasped raw by smoke and years. "We'll need more mutton and wool before winter hits. I'm nearly done with this tethering. We'll need all the parchment we can manage before the cold sets in."

The words left my lips before I even thought them, like a line rehearsed a thousand times.

Then came the touch.

A soft hand—warm, human—pressed gently against my shoulder. I turned and saw her: a woman of middle years, hair shot through with silver, her eyes carrying that weary kindness of someone who's had to love carefully for too long.

"I'll be in the house shortly, Caroline," I said to her automatically. "Just need to finish this binding before the sun drops. The ink won't keep."

She shook her head, and there was something pained in it—an ache that reached deeper than the conversation.

"Alex," she said quietly. "We're past the point of war. Arte usage is outlawed. We know why you're stockpiling parchment, but…"

Her words froze the air around me.

Arte usage is outlawed.

That wasn't possible. Not in Demeterra. Not in any world where Walkers still walked.

I looked around again, truly seeing for the first time—the faint flicker of a wood stove, the rough-cut furniture, the way the wind pressed against the shutters. There was no hum of mana anywhere. No faint trace of the world's natural rhythm. This place was dead—quiet in a way that only came when magic itself had been silenced.

"Where…?" I started, but the question dissolved as the illusion began to crack.

The workshop around me folded inward. The scent of wool and glue collapsed into smoke, into dust, into a gaping darkness that swallowed everything. I fell—weightless, disoriented, tumbling through a tunnel of shredded parchment and words that dissolved before I could read them.

Then, with a violent jolt, I landed.

This time, the body was mine.

Twelve years old. Scrawny. Bruised knees. My old school uniform.

Then again.

Fourteen—angry, quieter, the edge of defiance in my jawline.

And then again—fifteen—already burdened by choices I hadn't understood at the time.

And they were all standing there. Each version of me. Silent. Watching.

"Right," I said, brushing the dust off my coat, trying to ground myself in sarcasm. "So let me guess. I'm here to learn about another form of insecurity or trauma from my past I'm hiding?"

They looked at me like I'd spoken another language. The twelve-year-old tilted his head, confusion wrinkling his brow. The fourteen-year-old crossed his arms. The fifteen-year-old—he just stared. Tired, but patient, as though waiting for me to stop talking.

"Nothing?" I said. "No cryptic lines about courage, or freedom, or how every mistake builds the path forward?"

The fifteen-year-old smirked faintly. "You still think this is about lessons."

He stepped forward, and for a moment, it was like looking into a mirror that hadn't yet cracked. "You never stop trying to make everything make sense, do you? You'd rather frame it as 'growth' than admit it's grief."

The twelve-year-old looked down at his shoes. "You're different now."

"Am I?" I asked. "Or am I just better at pretending I'm not?"

The fourteen-year-old scoffed. "Pretending? You're doing the same thing we did. Running from her, trying to build your own peace. You didn't break free—you just changed the shape of the cage."

I felt my throat tighten. "That's not true."

But it was. Every version of me could see it.

The fifteen-year-old pointed behind him. "You remember the parchment, don't you? That wasn't another life. That was you, years from now. The end you could have chosen."

"Chosen?" I echoed.

He nodded. "If you'd stayed. If you'd stopped fighting. If you'd built something instead of chasing something."

The silence that followed was unbearable. The younger me shifted awkwardly. The older me turned away. I could hear the faint rustle of pages—the Red Mark, somewhere behind us, flipping open and closed in a phantom wind.

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"Then what am I supposed to do?" I finally asked. "If staying leads to silence, and fighting leads to ruin—what choice is left?"

The twelve-year-old's voice was small but steady. "You stop trying to choose like it's about being right. You just… live."

I looked at him. At all of them. Each one a fragment of what I used to be, what I could have been, what I might still become.

Then the floor beneath us began to dissolve again, the sound of tearing paper roaring through the void.

As I fell, I saw them fade—twelve, fourteen, fifteen—all swallowed by the white storm of parchment and memory.

And just before the darkness took me again, I heard that older voice—the one that wasn't mine—whisper from somewhere unseen:

"You keep binding your past, Alexander. But what happens when the parchment runs out?"

Darkness overcame me, once again.

***

When I opened my eyes, the world was humming. Not the quiet hum of mana-light bulbs or the mechanical sighs of a Machina's heart. This was deeper—alive. The trees breathed. The earth murmured. The air was thick, viscous, each inhalation dragging heat and life into my lungs until it burned.

And my body—my body was different. Broader, older. When I flexed my hand, the skin glowed faintly with veins of gold, like threads of sunlight trapped beneath the surface. I recognized none of it, yet every movement carried a familiarity I couldn't unlearn. Memory lingered in my muscles, not in my mind.

I sat cross-legged atop a stone platform carved into a mountainside. Below, the valley was shrouded in morning mist. Rows of crimson pines stretched endlessly, their needles glinting like spears. A waterfall poured from somewhere high above, feeding the river that cut through the fog below like a silver vein. I could taste the iron in the water from here.

Something was engraved into the platform beneath me—ancient sigils, half eroded by time but pulsing faintly. A cultivation array. I knew that term, though I had no memory of learning it.

A voice broke the silence. "Senior Brother Alexander, your core harmonization has reached the third ring already?"

I turned. A young man knelt at the edge of the platform, robes white and silver, hair tied with a thin jade band. He looked at me as though I were his teacher, his eyes wide with awe.

My voice when I answered was steady, deeper than my own. "Only because I endured the thunder path alone."

Thunder path? The phrase unlocked something. A flash of memory—not from my life, but this other one.

Rain falling like knives. My body struck again and again by lightning until it reshaped itself, forging the marrow within. Days of screaming in the storm until I learned to drink the pain and call it progress.

That was cultivation. Advancement through suffering.

The young disciple bowed his head. "The elders say you'll ascend to the Inner Court soon. Some whisper your meridians are flawless—born of a heavenly root."

I should have denied it, but the words that rose weren't mine. "Flawless roots still rot if the soil is weak. Go. Train harder, or your envy will slow your growth."

He left in silence.

I sat there, watching the sun lift through the mist, and tried to make sense of what I was seeing. A different world. A different Alexander. A life where my worth wasn't measured by Skillcubes or sanctioned exams, but by endurance, control, patience—the burning climb inward.

And somehow, I had climbed high.

Days—or hours; time blurred—passed in waves of memory. Each one swallowed me whole.

I was standing in a courtyard lined with marble dragons, my robes heavy with embroidered sigils. Students knelt before me as I lectured on spiritual compression, teaching them how to fold their qi into smaller, sharper forms. My voice carried authority. Respect. Fear.

Then another flicker: I was bleeding on a mountaintop, staring down a rival sect's champion. Our weapons had long since shattered; we fought with pure essence now, raw soul against soul. My breath came ragged, but I smiled—because the struggle itself was the only truth I'd ever known.

Then again: I was sitting by a river, older now. Hair streaked with white. A scroll unrolled before me, ink bleeding through from sleepless nights. I was writing a treatise: "On the Binding of Spirit and Form." I wrote that every cultivator would one day face a mirror—the reflection of who they could have been, and that reflection would devour them if they had no will left to choose.

Was that what this was? Was I devouring myself?

The scene shifted again.

A great hall, filled with the sound of distant chanting. I stood at its center, my pulse matching the rhythm of drums that boomed like thunder. My robes were crimson now—the color of those who had crossed into the Heartfire Realm. Around me, the air trembled with the pressure of thousands kneeling.

A voice like rolling stone spoke from the dais. "Alexander of the Scarlet Path. You have burned seven impurities from your heart. Speak your final wish before ascension."

I looked up. The Dominus of this world—or its equivalent—sat upon a throne carved from molten glass, the air warping around her presence.

"I wish," I heard myself say, "to walk free of heaven's ledger. To choose my own end."

A murmur rippled through the hall. Cultivators weren't supposed to speak of freedom that way. Every step of the path was ordained, structured, measured by the heavens. To defy that was blasphemy.

The Dominus smiled faintly. "Then you seek the path without sky."

And with a gesture, the hall split apart.

I fell again—through fire this time. My body burned, but not from heat—from rejection. The world itself was tearing me out of it, the way a wound expels infection.

When I landed, the world was quiet again.

I was back in the same valley, but the trees were dead. The riverbed was dust. The stone platform cracked in two.

A figure stood at the edge of the cliff, dressed in rags once colored white. His horn was broken—the same way mine had been in the parchment-maker's body. His hands trembled as he reached for the empty horizon.

It was me.

Not the me that cultivated. Not the me from Danatallion's Halls. Something in between.

He spoke without turning. "We climbed the path to touch freedom. Every realm we reached only built another cage."

"I know," I said. My voice sounded small.

"You think Skillcubes or Walkers are different?" he asked, still looking at the ruined sky. "We called it cultivation. You call it advancement. But it's the same trap. Endless ascent without arrival."

He turned then, and his eyes—my eyes—were tired beyond age.

"Every world measures you, Alexander. The only difference is the shape of the scale."

The wind shifted. His form flickered like a dying flame, each fragment dissolving into motes of red light that drifted toward me.

"Then what am I supposed to do?" I asked. "If every path leads to another chain?"

His answer came as he vanished completely, his voice carried on the wind:

"Stop climbing. Start becoming."

The light entered me, burning against my chest. For a moment, I could feel every world overlapping—the parchment and the thunder, the halls and the heavens—until all of them folded inward, drawn to the single, beating core of who I was.

And then, as the light dimmed, I awoke again—kneeling in a circle of cards.

The air was still. My hands were shaking. And somewhere deep inside, that other Alexander was still breathing.

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