"Demon General Luoyang, are you aware of your sins?"
"Yes."
"Then you have no qualms about your execution?"
"Yes."
Then came the sensation of a cold blade cutting through the back of his neck. It was a rough cut, a cut full of hatred. Hatred and only hatred.
His vision blackened.
'Not an ounce of pity. He must have had a grudge,' he thought.
'But of course.'
He had committed dozens of unforgivable sins. Sins he could not forgive himself for. Sins he thought he would never have to commit.
But they were sins he did not regret.
Amidst his thoughts came jubilant cheers, roars. Countless. Cheers of triumph, of celebration, of relief.
'Of course.'
Perhaps amongst the crowd stood people whose relatives he had killed, whose friends he had killed, whose lovers he had killed.
Perhaps all of them were victims. 'That would explain their cheers.'
The noise of triumph slowly faded, and in his ears began to echo a soft ringing. No, perhaps it was more similar to cries, shrill and sorrowful cries. Perhaps the souls of the deceased would not let him go so easily.
'Is this hell?' he thought. But unlike how he had imagined hell to be, all he saw was mere darkness. Black, just like the starless sky in the Sanctum of Fire where he was born.
'Just like that godless land.'
The past engulfed his thoughts in the form of memories. The time Emperor Xiang united the Sanctum; the time he was made a great general of the Demonic army; the time the portal to a new world appeared; the time where they had invaded that world, killing its residents who had rejected their stay.
Perhaps if there was regret, he had just one.
Failure.
Failure to complete his mission.
Failure to give the 'Demons' a habitable home.
Sins, he could bear, even countless, but failure he could not. Especially for this matter. This was his regret, his only regret, and a regret he would never be able to erase.
He was dead, after all. What could a headless corpse do?
'Nothing.'
Amidst his melancholy, he let out a self-deprecating scoff. There was truly nothing he could do about it. Lament would not help, either. This world of endless black accompanied by the endless cries of those he killed would be his home, his new 'life.'
'The cries are gone?' Lost in his thoughts once again, he had not realized that he could no longer hear the cries.
Only silence, deep and eternal. Just a world of black, accompanied by silence.
Nothingness.
Nullity.
'So this is death.'
Death. He had dragged countless others into the same state.
But in this world of nothing, soft thuds began to echo. It came along rhythmically in ones-and-twos.
'...Footsteps?'
He looked around, or at least attempted something of the sort. Turning around proved to be an impossible task without a body.
Then something shifted. A glint of white light appeared in the void, tiny, and barely noticeable. But since he longer had a sense of distance, he could not tell whether it was large and far, or whether it was small and near.
The light enlarged, getting bigger and bigger in his vision until finally, the world of black disappeared.
All he saw was white. A blinding white.
Then colors emerged; gray and white and blue. Many colors.
And now, he could feel a body. His body.
'Reincarnation?' he thought. He felt a soothing warmth enveloping his entire body as though he was wrapped in a silk blanket. And now, he could move. His senses began to return, slowly.
'Have I really reincarnated? Am I a child again?'
Blurry figures who he supposed were humans moved around him. They were mumbling about something, talking in a language he could not understand.
'...Are they talking about me?'
Then came a word he understood. A single word. The same word those of the previous world used to refer to his people.
"Demon!"
They were saying it while looking at him, pointing at him. Although he could not understand everything else, this one words he did. The word he had heard far too often.
'Did they bring me back to life to torture me? It can't be. They aren't speaking the same language.'
One of the figures suddenly burst forth, screaming 'demon' along with others words he could not understand, brandishing a sheening line of white he supposed was a sword. But another figure blocked the way, unsheathing their own blade to parry the strike.
His vision cleared, and the figures around him were revealed. They were elders; elders wearing different robes, all of them not much different than the robes sect elders from the previous world wore.
He turned his head. A feat he could not do a mere moment ago.
The man who had attempted to kill him was a white-robed elder, his eyes bloodshot as he resumed screaming while pushing his sword forwards, crazed. The man protecting him was bald, he saw, wearing a dark-blue robe. The man's back was facing him, and he could not see his face, but from his voice and posture, he could tell that the man was quite old.
The other elders watched from the sidelines, staring on just like he was. One of them pointed their finger while shouting, and another cackling as they watched on, perhaps enjoying the scene.
It was quite chaotic, quite a change compared to the state of nothingness he had just been through. But it was a welcomed change.
He looked around once again, turning his newborn head. Perhaps it was because he had been too occupied with the elders that he did not realize where he was.
He was within a dim, circular room, its architecture not much different than the one from his previous world. Surrounding everyone were gigantic stone pillars, and beyond these pillars were stone walls he could somehow tell were extremely thick.
Lit torches sitting on metal sconces were placed on every pillar, their flickering flames causing everyone's shadows to dance. They were the only sources of light in the room, and as they sat on every side, everyone within the room had multiple shadows.
'Is this… a cave?'
He suddenly shuddered as his sense of smell returned.
In the air permeated a thick, metallic smell, a smell he could not be more familiar with.
'Blood.'
Then he rolled over, trying to look behind. Standing behind his cradle, he saw a horse-faced middle-aged man stomping on something while letting out an eerie cackle. He could not see what was being stomped because he was placed in a high cradle, but he could hear.
It sounded as though he was stepping on some sort of puddle, and sometimes a thump would echo.
His vision cleared once more, and only then did he notice the stains of red liquid on the man's pants.
Along with that was a pale hand grasping onto the man's foot.
He squinted as though to verify what he was looking at before turning around. Such a thing was not foreign to him in his previous life, but now it somehow bothered him. Perhaps his new body had a weak heart.
One glance was enough for him to know to whom that hand belonged.
Within this room, there was one person missing.
'My mother.'
The thought surfaced and an odd feeling swept through his entire being. He rolled over once more, taking another glimpse of the man's face. He engraved it into his mind.
'Am I angry?' he thought. 'Perhaps this body is affecting my thoughts. My soul should not have any emotional connection to anything in this world. Even my…'
He inwardly sighed before glancing once more at the maddened elder trying to kill him and the bald man protecting him for a reason he did not know. They were still bickering, but their swords were now sheathed, hanging on their waists instead of pointing towards each other's neck.
Of course, the single word he understood occasionally came up in their argument.
'But how do they know? Is this body born with some special demonic physique?'
The bald elder turned around after the argument seemed to end, revealing his disturbingly wrinkled face as he approached. The man had gray eyebrows and his face was shaved clean without a trace of stubble. But nothing else about him was clean.
'He smells like shit.'
The man eaned into the cradle, placing his face right in front of Luoyang. Two luminous orbs of eerie yellow that seemed to be his pupils glinted in a mysterious light as the man opened his dry mouth, leaking out of which was a smell that reminded Luoyang of rotten corpses.
"Jin Hua," he said, and following that were mutterings Luoyang could not understand, punctuated by an occasional burst of saliva that splashed onto his face.
'Jin Hua? Is that my name?'
The old man resumed his mumbling until everyone besides him had left. 'Jin Hua' would occasionally come up, and every time the man said those words his tone softened.
Only when he said those words did spit not come out. Sometimes, the man leaned back and cackled, and at one point he made a cutthroat gesture, sliding his thumb on his wrinkled neck.
The elder then took Luoyang, now named Jin Hua, and carried him out of the room. And to his surprise, the old man carried him as though he was some sort of treasure, somewhat breaking the image he had that the old man was some sort of barbarian.
'Is he my father?' he thought as they left the room.
Rolling over, he saw a trail of blood from behind his cradle, passing through the exit the old man had just carried him through.
'The body was dragged away?'
But it seemed that the glance that he thought was subtle enough could not hide from the old man's gaze. The bald man looked towards the blood trail, said something, and laughed before closing Jin Hua's eyes with his palm.
He did not lift his odorous palm until they entered a new room. A large cave.
It was a dark, open area, the only thing preventing the cave from being pitch black being flickering torches hung on the great, stone walls. Above were large, strange shapes, telling Jin Hua that the ceiling had yet to be mined.
But this was not the most noticeable thing.
On the walls of the cave were countless holes, like caves within a cave. Inside these caves were flickering torchlight and single stone beds.
The bald man let out strange mumblings before approaching one of the caves and placing Jin Hua on the stone bed. He turned around, clenching his fist while resuming his mutterings before grudgingly walking off.
A few minutes passed. Then came an ominous rumbling, the noise of crunching stones and sliding boulders. The earth shook, and large chunks of stone fell from outside, blocking the only exit to the cave.
'...Are they trying to kill me right after I was born?'