The city stank of piss, blood, and smoke.
Cracked concrete towers clawed at a gray sky, their hollow windows like the eyes of dead things. Sirens howled in the distance, a thin, dying wail that never stopped. People hurried through the broken streets, hunched over, eyes darting like rats under a butcher’s knife.
kai moved through the crowd like a ghost.
No wasted movement. No unnecessary looks. His hands stayed buried in his coat pockets, one gripping a rusted piece of sharpened steel. Just in case.
Another teenager bumped into him — wide shoulders, shaved head, dead gaze.
kai caught the boy’s wrist before the knife fully cleared his jacket.
A twist, a snap. A low grunt of pain.
The boy collapsed into the gutter, clutching his broken wrist and gasping like a landed fish.
No one looked. No one cared.
kai kept walking.
He had grown up here, in the gutter world.
Born in an abandoned hospital, raised on rot and broken promises. By twelve, he had stopped believing in things like kindness or fairness. By fourteen, he had stopped believing in anything at all.
Only survival mattered.
Everything else was noise.
He learned early that the world didn’t reward strength, or speed, or charm.
It rewarded cleverness.
Precision.
Control.
The strongest got shot.
The fastest got betrayed.
The loudest got gutted in alleys.
But the smart ones… the smart ones endured.
They adapted.
They manipulated.
And kai had learned faster than anyone.
By the time he was twenty, he was a phantom — a rumor in the rotting neighborhoods of the city.
He didn’t fight gangs. He broke them from within.
He didn’t outrun death. He walked around it.
He spent his days learning — reading stolen books in abandoned apartments, studying biology, psychology, tactics. Not for school. Not for hope.
Just because knowledge was survival.
While others fought over scraps, kai built a fortress inside his own mind.
A place nothing could touch.
It happened one night without warning.
He was standing in the shell of an old library, flipping through a weathered anatomy textbook by the light of a stolen lantern.
Something inside him clicked.
It wasn’t a feeling, not really.
It was like… a lock turning inside his chest. A puzzle he didn’t know he was solving suddenly finishing itself.
The city noise seemed to dim.
The air grew heavy, thick, electric.
kai looked down at his hands.
They were the same. Pale, calloused, scarred.
But something was different.
He felt… complete.
Finished.
As if he had reached the absolute limit of what this world could offer him.
He set the book down and closed his eyes.
The floor buckled beneath his feet.
Not violently — no, it was almost gentle.
Like the ground itself was sighing, giving up.
Reality peeled away like wet paper.
Colors bled out of the world.
Sound faded into silence.
And then kai was falling — not down, not up, but inward, toward something vast and ancient and waiting.
He did not scream.
He did not resist.
There was nothing left for him here.
The world had been conquered.
The game was over.
It was time to move on. Perfect — exactly what I needed.
The fall ended not with a crash, but with silence.
kai floated in a vast, colorless void.
No ground beneath his feet.
No sky above his head.
Just endless gray, stretching forever.
His breath misted in the still air.
Or maybe it was the world itself exhaling.
He waited.
Seconds.
Minutes.
Hours.
He couldn’t tell.
Then, a voice spoke.
No sound. No language.
Just pure meaning pressed into his mind like a branding iron.
[Welcome, Ascended One.]
kai eyes narrowed. He said nothing.
The voice continued, cold and mechanical.
[You have achieved Perfection within your world.]
[Access to the Greater Realms is now granted.]
A ripple passed through the void.
In the distance, faint lights flickered — worlds hanging like dying stars, too far to touch.
The voice spoke again.
[World Classification: L-9.]
[Perfection Achieved: Intelligence.]
[Innate Strength: Negligible.]
kai absorbed the information calmly.
L-9.
The lowest of the low.
Because his world had relied on external tools. Books. Technology. Systems.
Not inner strength.
Not blood or bone or soul.
In the hierarchy of the God Realm, he was little more than trash.
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He clenched his fists slowly, feeling the weakness in his body.
No sudden power.
No blazing energy.
Just… himself.
The voice pressed on, indifferent.
Warning: Survival chances — 0.01%. Adaptation necessary.]
[Additional Guidance: None.]
[Initiating Transfer.]
A black sigil appeared beneath kai, shifting like molten tar.
It expanded, swallowing him.
He did not struggle.
He did not shout.
He merely sharpened the edge of his mind.
Before the darkness claimed him completely, the voice offered one final, sterile whisper.
[Good luck.]
And then the void collapsed.
There was no ceremony.
No light.
No divine welcome.
kai woke in the mud.
Gray dirt clung to his skin, cold and wet, leeching warmth from his bones.
The sky above was a churning black void. Pale moons hung like the eyes of corpses.
The air stank of iron and rot.
He sat up slowly. Every part of his body ached. He felt… fragile. Mortal.
A far cry from the things he could sense moving in the distance
This was the God Realm?
It looked more like a graveyard.
He stood, scanning the twisted landscape — broken pillars, scattered ruins, strange trees with flesh instead of bark.
Something roared in the distance. The ground trembled.
kai didn’t move.
He needed information. Observation first. Always shape emerged from the mist.
Tall. Gaunt. Wrong.
It walked on all fours, dragging its elongated arms like broken spears. Its face was a mess of stitched mouths, all whispering different things. One eye — far too large — locked onto him.
It sniffed.
Target acquired.
kai ran.
He didn’t try to fight. He had seen enough in that one glance The monster’s muscle tension. Its unnatural movement. The density in its limbs.
It would break his body like paper.
The creature screamed and surged forward.
He didn’t look back. Just ran.
Twisting through narrow ruins. Darting through cracked stone.
He knew this game — it was no different than running from the gangs in the city.
Find the terrain.
Use the environment.
Buy time.
He dove through a narrow gap under a fallen archway. The monster smashed into it moments later, cracking the stone.
It was too large to follow.
But it didn’t need to.
It reared back.
Its many mouths screamed And then it hurled a bone spear — jagged, twisted, impossibly fast.
It impaled kai clean through the chest.
For a moment, he stood, staring at it.
Then everything went black.
[RESET INITIATED]
[Time: -5 minutes]
He gasped awake in the mud again.
Same mud. Same pain.
Same twisted moons above.
But this time… he was smiling.
“Got you,” he muttered.
Run. Again.
Same route. Same monster. Same roar.
But this time, as he passed under the archway, he grabbed a loose column stone and wedged it into place. Just enough.
When the monster reared back to throw — the ceiling above it cracked.
And caved in.
Not enough to kill it. But enough to slow it. To blind it with dust.
kai didn’t wait.
He moved to the next ruin, already plotting.
Over the next three resets, he died to the creature’s claws, to poison breath, to collapsing ruins he misjudged.
But every time, he learned.
Every death gave him more Until finally — on the sixth try — he didn’t just escape.
He killed it.
Not with strength.
But with leverage, misdirection, and gravity.
He lured the thing across a brittle stone bridge.
Then shattered the supports with a redirected landslide he’d rigged minutes earlier.
The creature fell — screaming — into a field of jagged black spines.
And didn’t come back up.
Vayne waited ten minutes.
Then climbed down.
The body was impaled, twitching.
He drew a shard of stone and stabbed into the creature’s torso, searching for something he didn’t fully understand — until his fingers brushed it.
A shard.
Not bone. Not flesh.
Memory. Skill. Essence.
He pulled it free.
A burning jolt of instinct flooded his spine — like a forgotten motion returning.
Suddenly, he knew how to shift his weight like the monster had.
How to twist mid-movement.
It wasn’t perfect. But it was muscle memory — imprinted into him He smiled.
For the first time since entering this place, he had taken something.
Not stolen. Not borrowed.
Claimed.
He was still weak.
Still fragile.
Still a bottom-feeder in a realm of gods.
But he had something they didn’t.
A mind sharpened like a scalpel.
A system that let him fail — and learn.
And a will that would never break.
Let them come.
He would bleed them, break them, manipulate them.
Until he ruled them.
One corpse at a time The first thing Kai realized, after killing the monster, was this:
“Information is power. And I have five minutes to learn what most will die to understand.”
So he didn’t rest. He didn’t explore aimlessly.
He dissected the monster’s corpse. Not out of curiosity. Out of need. Where was the shard located? What triggered its manifestation? Could it be extracted faster?
He mapped it out — spine, ribs, organs. Took mental notes of the shard’s feel, weight, placement.
Five minutes later, he intentionally impaled himself on one of the nearby black spikes.
He died.
[RESET INITIATED]
[-5 minutes]
He gasped.
Back at the corpse.
This time, he moved with precision.
Cut faster. Dug cleaner.
Shard retrieved in under 12 seconds.
He reset again.
Then again.
And again.
Until retrieving a shard took him 4.3 seconds.
On instinct. Eyes closed.
Why?
Because when others arrive, and they kill something strong…
They’ll waste time Kai would already have the shard.
Next: the blood system.
He found another monster. Weaker — but erratic.
He let it chase him. Lure it into terrain traps. Stabbed it through the neck with a rusted spike
He bled it into a chipped cup made of stone.
Drank.
And collapsed.
The pain was immediate — a storm of unformed memories and searing confusion.
Not like the shard. This was pure chaos.
He reset.
Then, he did it smarter.
He killed the monster after memorizing its movements, its tells. Then drank
This time, he gained something minor. A twitch of reaction time.
So he made a rule:
“If I drink blood, it must be from a being whose abilities I’ve already observed. Never random. Never for greed. Drink with purpose — or die like a fool.”
Then, he began hunting the terrain itself.
He set traps for monsters. Trained his body to adapt.
Every time he died, he mapped more of the land.
Every time he reset, he practiced recovering his body within seconds He built safe routes, decoy paths, refuges.
He began to understand the cycle of monsters’ revival.
And from their remains, he collected shards.
Stored them in hollowed skulls. Hid them behind crumbled stones.
By the time others would arrive, Kai would already have:
? A map of early terrain, with safe spots and lethal zones
? Speed-extraction techniques for monster shards.
? A tested blood protocol — knowing which creatures gave useful reactions.
? Safe kill-zones, where he could manipulate others into walking into danger.
? Hidden shard caches for emergency upgrades.
? Traps disguised as terrain, because others wouldn’t reset. They’d only die once
And Kai?
He’d die a hundred times if he had to.
Because each death made him smarter.
And everyone else was going to find out too late…
This realm doesn’t reward strength.
It rewards adaptation
It happened faster than Kai could react.
One moment he was creeping along a jagged slope, hunting for another shard monster.
The next — something slammed into him. A blur of movement, heavier than anything he fought before.
A human.
Not a monster.
And this one wasn’t weak.
[YOU HAVE DIED]
[-5 minutes]
Kai gasped awake.
Blood on his lips. His spine still remembering the break
He barely had time to roll aside before the man found him again — a lean figure wrapped in stitched leather and tarnished armor, wielding a jagged sword.
Fast. Efficient.
Not a brute.
A killer.
Kai died again.
[YOU HAVE DIED]
[-5 minutes]
Again.
And again.
And again
he died thirty-nine times just trying to survive the first five seconds.
Died sixty more trying to land a single hit.
Died two hundred more trying to understand the man’s movement, his instincts, his weapon reach
Every death taught him something.
Not much.
But a sliver more.
The man hunted him without mercy.
Every ambush failed.
Every trick was seen through.
Every desperate dodge was crushed under ruthless precision
Kai realized something critical:
“He’s not just stronger. He’s used to fighting geniuses.”
In the man’s world, talent was everywhere.
Weakness was a death sentence.
Kai was a lamb to slaughter
But lambs have teeth too — if they survive long enough.
After the three hundredth death, Kai changed tactics.
No more fighting.
No more head-on clashes
He studied.
He let himself die on purpose to learn timing.
Let himself be gutted to memorize reach.
Let himself be snapped like a twig to find recovery windows
He built a mental map of the man’s habits —
where he swung too wide,
where he overcommitted by half a step,
where his eyes betrayed a kill-lust blind spot.
Three hundred and ninety-eight deaths later, Kai was ready.
He baited the killer
Led him through a shattered cavern mouth with collapsed ceilings.
Kai sprinted — stumbling, acting injured — forcing the man to chase him harder.
He timed it perfectly.
At the exact moment the man slashed —
Kai threw a shard he had hidden earlier
Not at the man.
At the ceiling.
CRASH.
Thousands of pounds of rock caved in.
It wasn’t enough to kill the man.
But it slowed him — broke his rhythm.
Kai lunged.
Not with strength
With timing.
A shard knife to the thigh.
Another to the kidney.
Then he tackled him over a crumbled ledge.
The man snapped his sword upward — cutting Kai’s side —
but Kai smiled through the blood.
He bit the man’s throat
Hard.
A disgusting spray of blood.
He drank — and felt the system unlock.
[KILL CONFIRMED.]
[CHOOSE ONE ACQUISITION:]
? [Sword Technique: Blood Dance]
? [Passive Skill: Monstrous Reflex]
? [Minor Skill: Predator’s Focus]
Most would pick the sword technique
Dazzling. Powerful.
Kai didn’t.
He picked Predator’s Focus — the least glamorous skill.
Because it gave hyper-tuned senses.
Not raw strength.
Not flashy techniques
Information.
He felt his world sharpen.
The subtle shifts of breath.
The almost-silent scrape of steel against rock.
The heartbeat of prey
Information.
He felt his world sharpen.
The subtle shifts of breath.
The almost-silent scrape of steel against rock.
The heartbeat of prey.
Kai looked down at the dead man’s broken body
There was no triumph.
No rage.
Only cold calculation.
He dragged the body away from the open field.
Hid it beneath rubble.
If anyone found it, they wouldn’t know who killed him
Kai wasn’t just fighting to survive anymore.
He was fighting to dominate.
In this world of gods and monsters —
only those who planned beyond death would survive
The corpse lay still under the rubble, the smell of blood heavy in the air.
Kai crouched over it in silence.
Not with disgust.
Not with sadness.
Only calculation.
Predator’s Focus buzzed in his veins, sharpening every sound and shadow
But it wasn’t enough.
Not nearly enough.
He knew it the moment he checked the kill options again —
knew it the moment he weighed the true value of what was still locked inside the corpse.
Skills he needed
Skills he could steal.
“One death. One skill. No one said it had to stop there.”
Kai’s mind raced.
The system didn’t care how many times he reset.
If he could kill this man again and again —
he could peel him like a corpse-tree, harvesting the best parts one by one
He could become something that should not exist.
A creature born of blood, intellect, and ruthless patience.
Others would only kill once.
Kai would kill a thousand times if needed.
He gripped a shard knife
No hesitation.
No fear.
He jammed it into his throat.
[YOU HAVE DIED]
[-5 minutes]
Time bent around him.
The world twisted.
Kai gasped awake — lying again at the foot of the same rocky outcropping.
The killer was alive again, tracking him.
But this time —
Kai was prepared.
Predator’s Focus sang in his blood.
He heard the man’s heartbeat through the rocks.
Felt the faint shift of breath before the attack.
When the killer lunged, Kai was already moving.
One step ahead
He led him again through the broken cavern —
again baited him into the falling rubble —
again stabbed deep with vicious precision.
It was easier this time
Almost graceful.
The man collapsed, bleeding out, shocked.
Another brutal victory.
[KILL CONFIRMED.]
[CHOOSE ONE ACQUISITION:]
? [Sword Technique: Blood Dance]
? [Passive Skill: Monstrous Reflex]
Kai didn’t even blink
He picked Monstrous Reflex.
And the moment it integrated —
his body felt like fire.
Muscles snapped tighter.
Movements blurred at the edge of thought
He wasn’t just seeing faster anymore.
He was moving faster too.
Again he crouched by the corpse.
Again he made the calculation.
He could stop now.
He could keep these two skills — Predator’s Focus and Monstrous Reflex — and be ahead of any weak prey
But that wasn’t how he would survive.
Survival wasn’t enough.
Domination was the goal.
Kai smiled thinly.
The third death hurt worse.
Blood filled his lungs as he cut his own throat cleanly.
[YOU HAVE DIED]
[-5 minutes]
Reset.
Back again.
The world twisted around his awareness.
This time, Kai didn’t even let the killer get near.
He moved before the man could prepare —
darting forward with superhuman precision, baiting a swing, sliding under it, and driving a shard through his femoral artery.
A calculated, lethal dance.
The man gasped in confusion as his life drained away
He never understood how everything had flipped so quickly.
[KILL CONFIRMED.]
[CHOOSE ONE ACQUISITION:]
? [Sword Technique: Blood Dance]
Finally.
Kai took the sword art.
It flooded into his muscle memory —
a brutal, beautiful killing technique made for cutting through anything weaker than you
Perfect for a predator.
Perfect for someone like him.
He crouched again over the broken body.
There was no joy.
Only the ticking machine of his mind, already planning the next hunt
Status:
? Predator’s Focus (Passive): Hyper-tuned senses, prediction of enemy movements.
? Monstrous Reflex (Passive): Instant reaction time, body adapts to threats at inhuman speeds.
? Blood Dance (Skill): An overwhelming sword style specializing in fatal chains of strikes.
Kai stood, breathing slowly.
The “world of gods” — for all it myths —
was just a butcher’s yard for those willing to become monsters.
And Kai?
He was willing.
More than willing
