When Lucian opened his eyes, he found himself sitting on the cold, grimy floor of what appeared to be an abandoned bathroom. The tiles were cracked and stained, and a faint smell of mildew lingered in the air.
He tried to move, but his entire body throbbed with pain, as though he had been beaten relentlessly. His muscles ached, and every small shift sent sharp jolts through his limbs.
When he attempted to lift his hands, he realized they were bound. A heavy metallic weight dug into his wrists. Looking down, Lucian saw that he was handcuffed to a rusted pipe along the wall.
He examined the cuffs more closely, noticing that the insides were torn and jagged, designed to cut into flesh if someone tried to force their way out.
The thought made him smile. Lucian activated Nexus, the advanced neural interface embedded in his wrist. As the familiar interface flickered to life, it flooded his mind with data, filling in the gaps about the body he was now inhabiting.
The shell he inhabited was called Leo Lan. Leo was a beta born in the Zephyra Empire and raised within the powerful Lan family, a dynasty that dominated the galaxy with their sprawling corporate empire, LanCorp Industries.
The company had four subsidiaries, each specializing in a distinct field: technology, science, life and luxury, and entertainment. It was an empire built on innovation and influence.
Leo's father, Caelum Lan, was the president of LanTech Solutions, the tech subsidiary of LanCorp. From a young age, Caelum had raised Leo to be the heir to LanTech.
However, Leo was no ordinary child. He had been born with Hypercognitive Awareness Syndrome (HCAS)—an exceptionally rare genetic condition that enhanced neural connectivity and accelerated brain development.
By the age of two, children with HCAS exhibited extraordinary intelligence, self-awareness, and near-perfect memory retention. Their cognitive abilities far surpassed those of most adults, granting them unparalleled problem-solving skills and emotional intelligence.
Although Leo's parents, Caelum and Celeste, had never officially tested him for HCAS, they quickly recognized his extraordinary potential. Thankfully, Leo had a natural passion for technology.
By the time he was eight years old, he had already created devices that brought billions of credits to LanTech. Across the empire, he became known as the beautiful genius, a prodigy whose creations were impossible to resist.
Despite being a beta, Leo's delicate features and graceful demeanor made him look like an omega, which only amplified his popularity. His presence enchanted everyone he met, and people adored the idea of a brilliant, omega-like beta who could outshine even the most experienced inventors.
By the time he was a teenager, Leo's fame had brought immense prestige to the Lan family. Invitations to the most exclusive events across the Zephyra Empire flowed in, all because of him. But everything changed when Leo turned sixteen.
A young man named Ryder arrived at their doorstep one day, a grief-stricken boy who had recently lost his parents in a car accident. Ryder revealed shocking news: he and Leo had been switched at birth. To prove it, Ryder presented evidence, and after DNA testing, it was confirmed—Ryder was the biological son of Caelum and Celeste Lan.
Caelum and Celeste decided to adopt Ryder, who had been living with a foster family. They took him into their home, and over time, Ryder proved himself to be talented in technology, much like Leo.
Seeing Ryder's potential, Caelum proposed a plan: Ryder would serve as the heir to LanTech for the next three years, until their graduation, after which Leo would reclaim his position, and Ryder would work under him.
At the time, Leo had no objections. After spending most of his life in the public eye—constantly recognized, admired, and scrutinized—he welcomed the opportunity to step back. His passion for technology remained, but the constant attention had worn him down. He longed for a more discreet, anonymous life.
Around the same time, Leo's physical appearance began to change. His previously soft and omega-like features grew into those of a creature straight out of a horror movie. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, Leo began wearing a holomask at all times, concealing his true face.
He paired this with loose, nondescript clothing, which helped him blend in. For the first time in years, Leo was no longer the center of attention—and he finally experienced the quiet solitude he had always craved.
Leo spent the next three years juggling school, his position as an assistant to the Chief Operating Officer—a title that had once been his but now belonged to Ryder—and his work in his private laboratory. It was a careful balance, a quiet life in the shadows compared to the one he'd once led.
The day after graduation, Leo returned to the school to retrieve a few belongings he had left behind. That was when it happened. Two masked alphas ambushed him. Their attack was brutal, a calculated display of violence.
After beating him mercilessly, they drugged him and left him in the bathroom of an abandoned building on campus—a place they knew no one would visit.
To ensure his isolation, they handcuffed him to a pipe and left an ArctiSphere, a sinister device capable of dropping the temperature to Antarctic levels in minutes. They shattered his cell phone to make tracking him impossible and vanished into the shadows.
It wasn't until two weeks later that Leo's frozen body was discovered. By then, the damage was irreversible. The case went cold, much like his lifeless body. The two culprits were never identified, and the murder of the LanTech prodigy became another unsolved mystery in the empire's archives.
As Lucian processed the flood of information, a cold smile crept across his face. "So, they've turned the villain into cannon fodder," he muttered. It was almost laughable.
Cannon fodder was a role rife with opportunities to rise from the ashes. He would rewrite this story, and in doing so, he would gain power for letting the soul continue into its journey to reincarnation instead of having it roam this world in pain.
Yet, there was something strange—something almost invasive—about the feelings that lingered within him. The original's emotions were still there, raw and vivid, as though Lucian was sharing the space with another presence.
Oddly enough, he didn't mind. In fact, he welcomed it. Over the years, Lucian had grown detached, and unfeeling. When he played the villain in his past lives, it was effortless because it was simply himself—cold, pragmatic, untouched by sentiment.
But now, with Leo's emotions stirring within him, it was as if a part of him was waking up after being dormant for too long.
"Maybe this is good," he thought. Feeling something—anything—was better than the numbness that had haunted him.
Even the physical pain that coursed through his body felt grounding, a tether to reality he hadn't experienced in five lifetimes. Omni had once rewarded his compliance by removing his ability to feel pain, but now he chose to keep it. He relished it, even as it stung and burned.
Lucian glanced at the cuffs digging into his wrists. The jagged edges tore at his skin, and blood pooled beneath them. Despite this, he remained calm, accessing Nexus to find a solution. He discovered a vial in the system, one that would give him enough strength to survive until he reached a hospital.
The vial materialized in his hand, and he drank it in one swift motion. It burned as it went down, igniting his veins with a strange warmth that contrasted sharply with the icy numbness threatening to overtake him.
Lucian focused on freeing himself. He tugged one hand free from the cuffs, but the thorns inside the metal bit deep into his flesh. The pain was excruciating, and by the time he freed his hand, blood was streaming down his arm, leaving deep lacerations that refused to stop bleeding.
Gritting his teeth, he freed the other hand, enduring the same agony as the first. His shirt was already ruined, so he shrugged off the oversized jacket he wore and ripped strips from the fabric. Wrapping his hands as best he could, he staunched the bleeding, though the makeshift bandages quickly turned red.
Lucian pushed himself to his feet, swaying slightly as the room spun around him. He stumbled toward the cracked mirror hanging on the wall and froze as his reflection stared back at him.
The holomask he wore rippled faintly, its featureless surface reflecting the dim light of the decrepit bathroom. Yet his eyes—piercing, icy blue—shone through the shimmering façade. They were sharp, calculating, and filled with a detached intensity that seemed to see everything and judge it all.
His shoulder-length hair, a deep shade of ashen black, was tied in a messy bun. Loose strands framed his face, adding a rough, roguish charm to his otherwise composed appearance. Despite the disarray, it felt deliberate, as though the original owner of this body had never needed to care about his looks because they spoke for themselves.
Lucian's clothing reflected his current state. His black pants, practical and unassuming, were smudged with dirt from the floor. His white shirt, once clean and crisp, was now a macabre canvas of bloodstains.
Some were dark and dried, remnants of the attack, while others were fresh and vibrant, dripping from his torn hands. The shirt clung to him in places, damp with sweat and blood, a stark reminder of the ordeal he'd endured.
Despite it all, there was an unsettling elegance to him—a commanding presence that lingered even in the face of such brutality. Lucian tilted his head slightly, studying his reflection with a faint smirk.
Lucian glanced at the clock displayed on Nexus. Ten minutes before Caelum arrived, he noted to himself, his thoughts sharp and calculating. With a swift double tap to the side of his head, he deactivated the mask to assess the extent of the damage Ryder had inflicted with the drug he had slipped into the original.
The flickering shimmer of the holomask faded, revealing the grotesque truth beneath. Lucian caught his reflection in the polished glass of a nearby surface, and the sight was nothing short of disturbing.
His pale skin was a canvas of horror, marred by clusters of swollen, bulbous boils. The disfigurements stretched the skin taut, the largest of them throbbing faintly, their yellowish pus glistening under the light.
Each boil seemed to pulse as if it had its own heartbeat, threatening to burst at any moment. Spider-like veins branched out from beneath the inflamed skin, tinged with sickly hues of purple and red.
The sharp clarity of his blue eyes, unyielding and intelligent, was the only part of him that remained untouched. Yet even they felt out of place, their piercing gaze standing in stark contrast to the warped flesh surrounding them.
His lips were cracked, blood dried at the corners, and when he moved, the boils shifted grotesquely, their rippling surfaces a reminder of his body's corruption.
Lucian could feel the original's anguish seeping through the layers of their shared consciousness. This was the same man who had been hailed as a beautiful genius since childhood, celebrated not only for his intellect but also for his striking appearance.
To see himself reduced to this—this horror—was unbearable for him. The original's deep shame and fury burned like a second heartbeat within Lucian.
Lucian's thoughts sharpened, focusing on the origin of the betrayal. Ryder. Ryder, an ordinary beta, had always envied the original. Even though Leo had also been a beta, his beauty and brilliance had drawn admiration from all corners of the empire.
His delicate features and omega-like charm had only added to Ryder's resentment. So, after Ryder's rebirth, he wasted no time in orchestrating his rise to power.
Ryder met his birth parents earlier, quickly ingratiating himself with them. He played on Caelum's ambitions, ensuring he was positioned to inherit LanTech. Then he turned his full attention to destroying the original's life.
The two drugs Ryder had given the original were acts of calculated cruelty. The first forced Leo's body to transition into an omega, knowing full well that Caelum disdained omegas and would view the change as a weakness.
Ryder then conspired with a disgraced scientist who had once worked with his father, convincing him to claim that the gender shift would impair Leo's cognitive abilities.
It worked. Caelum lied to the original, pretending that Ryder's position as heir was temporary—just a placeholder until they graduated. The lie had been carefully crafted, a soft betrayal wrapped in promises that Caelum had no intention of keeping.
Caelum tricked him into signing a three-year assistant contract, to ensure he wouldn't leave LanCorp to work for a competitor before he became completely useless.
What the original didn't realize was that his old, prestigious contract as Chief Operating Officer had been quietly voided, leaving him bound to an inferior position with no real authority or protection.
Caelum's deception didn't end there. He enlisted his wife, Celeste, to persuade the original to accept a temporary role as his assistant.
She approached him with carefully rehearsed concern, convincing him that Caelum needed help for just a month until a permanent assistant could be hired. Still reeling from the sudden changes in his life, the original reluctantly agreed.
A month passed and Caelum began to realize that the scientist's claims about his mental decline were exaggerated and that it would take a couple of years before he became useless.
Instead of correcting his mistake or reinstating his son's rightful position, Caelum chose to make him the assistant of the Chief Operating Officer—ironically, the title he had once held himself.
Caelum refused to acknowledge his contributions. He didn't bother drafting a proper contract for him, nor did he pay him the appropriate salary.
Over time, it became clear that the "temporary" arrangement was never meant to end. Despite his new role as Ryder's assistant, the original's work ethic couldn't be denied.
The original had essentially been demoted and robbed of his achievements, reduced to working in the shadow of the man who had usurped his life.
Lucian clenched his fists, the motion sending a sharp pain through his injured hands. Blood seeped through the makeshift bandages, but he barely noticed. The anger he felt, both his own and the original's, was a raging storm inside him.
"You made him believe he was useless," Lucian muttered, his voice low but icy. "You reduced him to this... and you didn't even have the courage to look him in the eye while you did it."
He straightened, his grotesque reflection flickering back into view as the holomask adjusted. For now, he'd let them believe their lies had buried him. But Lucian had no intention of staying buried.
Lucian sifted through Nexus, searching for the perfect cure for the grotesque
disfigurements that marred his appearance. When he found it, a small bottle materialized in his hand, shimmering with a faint glow.
He didn't hesitate, drinking it all in one swift motion. As the liquid coursed through him, he watched in fascination as the boils melted away, leaving his skin smooth and flawless.
The transformation was astonishing, and when he finally looked at himself, he understood why Ryder, Celeste, and Aura harbored such jealousy toward the original.
With the grotesque disfigurement gone, his face was nothing short of breathtaking. His skin seemed almost luminous, as if kissed by moonlight, glowing faintly in soft, pearlescent hues.
Sharp, elegant cheekbones framed his features, lending him a regal, almost fragile beauty that was counterbalanced by the strength in his defined jawline.
His blue eyes, which before had been piercing and cold, now carried a mesmerizing depth. They radiated warmth and an air of mystery, resembling sunlight sparkling over tranquil waters.
Framed by dark, feathery lashes, his gaze seemed to pull people in, holding them captive with its intensity. Lucian's lips were naturally full, perfectly shaped, and tinged with a soft rose hue, as though perpetually on the verge of a smile.
However, the faint melancholy lingering in his expression gave him an air of quiet, haunting allure. His hair, tied loosely in a messy bun, now looked like threads of liquid silk.
Dark waves cascaded down with subtle streaks of silver running through them, catching the light like threads of starlight. Stray strands framed his face, giving him a slightly wild, untamed look, like a mythical figure brought to life.
Even the blood splattered on his white shirt didn't detract from his beauty. If anything, the stark contrast of red against the pale fabric only heightened his ethereal appearance.
He looked like a fallen angel or a character pulled from a tale of old—a being too perfect for this world, caught in the harshness of reality.
Lucian allowed himself a small smile as he felt the original's joy bubbling up inside him. It was rare for him to feel such positive emotions so vividly, but the sheer happiness and relief coursing through him were almost infectious.
With his renewed appearance, Lucian turned his attention to the shattered cell phone on the floor. Ryder's goons had stomped on it repeatedly to ensure it couldn't be used to track him.
Lucian crouched down, carefully prying the SIM card from the wreckage, and then walked over to his satchel.
He retrieved a sleek new cellphone, its surface gleaming with advanced tech, and slid the SIM card into place.
The device powered on instantly, and within moments, a holographic screen projected into
the air before him.
A small, animated emoji popped up—a bright, cheerful face with wide, shining eyes.
"Hello," the digital assistant greeted, its voice light and chipper.
Lucian's lips curved into a faint smile as he replied, "Hello, Prim."
The emoji's expression brightened further as it chirped, "Voice recognized. Welcome back, Master."
Lucian activated his tracking app, wasting no time in pursuing the original's plans. His movements were deliberate, and precise, as he set about finishing what had been left undone.
The first task was to secure the original's intellectual property. He patented the cutting-edge tech line he had designed, copyrighted the AI systems he had developed and protected every app he had created.
Multiple holographic windows flickered to life before him, each displaying a different task in progress. He began downloading files—his life's work—and uploading them into a secure database.
As the system scoured its archives to confirm no one else had claimed his creations, Lucian glanced at the tracking feed. A small notification revealed Caelum was just three minutes away, gliding through the city in his sleek hovercar.
Lucian's expression darkened slightly at the memory of the original timeline. After discovering the original's frozen body, they stole his work, paraded it as their own, and never gave him credit. It was a cruel betrayal, one that Lucian intended to rectify.
The original had been on the verge of releasing his tech line through LanTech. But everything changed after last night's disaster of a dinner. That event had been the final straw.
Disillusioned and heartbroken, the original decided to leave the family behind. He had risen early that morning to finalize a deal on a house—his first step toward independence. The purchase was meant to be completed five days later, a promise of a fresh start cruelly snatched away.
Lucian's jaw tightened, but he forced himself to focus. A soft chime brought his attention back to the holographic screen. The site confirmed that all his work was eligible for patenting and copyrighting. Without hesitation, Lucian secured everything.
He knew what this move would mean. Offers from rival companies would flood in. Official, the empire's primary trademarking platform, made a fortune notifying corporations when promising patents were filed. It wouldn't be long before someone reached out.
Lucian smirked faintly—this time, he would be the one holding the cards. Next, he opened Holofeed, the most popular social platform in the empire. The original had created an account as a child, sharing snippets of his genius creations and moments of his life.
Over the years, the account has gained a massive following, boasting an impressive twenty-five million followers. It was more than just a social media account—it was a legacy.
Lucian quickly changed the email and password linked to the account, ensuring Celeste could no longer exploit it. In the past, she had used the original's fame to build her own following, branding herself as an influencer and leveraging his success for her benefit.
Lucian felt a surge of satisfaction as he secured the account, cutting off one of the many ways the family had used the original. He wasn't just reclaiming a social platform; he was taking back control. This was only the beginning.
Even though the original hadn't posted on Holofeed in three years, his popularity hadn't wavered. His last post had been a short hologram announcing he was taking a break.
When news broke that Ryder was Caelum and Celeste's biological son, many of his followers grew concerned. The worry only deepened when the original started hiding his appearance.
Without his recognizable features, it felt like he had vanished entirely from the public eye.
Speculation ran rampant, with fans suspecting that Caelum and Celeste had replaced him with Ryder.
To calm the growing outrage, Celeste had pressured him to post a message saying he was fine and had chosen to take some time off. Once the storm subsided, she took full control of the account, changing the email and password.
She claimed it was "simpler" this way, so she wouldn't have to bother him every time she wanted to post something or promote her own ventures.
Thanks to the original's fame, Celeste had amassed five million followers and used the platform to paint herself as the perfect mother and influencer.
But Lucian smirked darkly at the thought. "Once I'm done with her, the entire galaxy will despise her."
When he finished securing the Holofeed account, Lucian turned his attention to another task.
Using the system, he hacked into the security server at the Lan family estate, downloading the footage of last night's dinner. Having hard evidence would be essential for what he planned next.
Satisfied, Lucian shrugged on his bloodstained jacket but quickly discarded it into a trash bin along with the makeshift bandages wrapped around his injured hands.
The moment the fabric was removed, his wounds began to bleed profusely again, crimson streaks running down his fingers and dripping onto the ground.
He glanced at Nexus and confirmed that Caelum had arrived and was tracking him, his footsteps drawing closer by the second. Lucian didn't flinch. Instead, he made his next move.
After flooding the area with a surge of pheromones, Lucian activated a device—the Beamer—the original had invented. It hummed softly before enveloping him in light, transporting him instantly to the nearest hospital.
This was a prototype invention, and hospitals didn't have beam receptors for obvious security reasons. Yet Lucian's ingenuity bypassed that obstacle effortlessly.
When he materialized in the middle of the hospital lobby, everyone froze in stunned disbelief.
Patients, nurses, and doctors stared, their shock evident. "How did he manage that?" someone murmured, their voice tinged with awe and confusion.
The murmurs stopped abruptly when they saw his hands. Blood was pouring freely from deep, jagged wounds, staining his pale skin and dripping onto the pristine white floors.
A nurse rushed toward him, her professional instincts taking over as she reached out to steady him.
Lucian's voice was weak, barely audible, as he whispered, "Help..."
His knees buckled, and he collapsed into the nurse's arms. Gasps filled the room as his body went limp, his holomask flickering faintly.
The ethereal shimmer of the mask did little to hide the haunting beauty beneath, and for a moment, all anyone could do was stare. Then, chaos erupted as medical staff scrambled to save him.