The white ceiling had become Kayn's most intimate companion. Its blank canvas stretched above him, unmarred save for a thin crack that snaked from the corner nearest the window—a flaw he had traced with his eyes ten thousand times, memorizing each minute deviation like the lines on a lover's palm.
Twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years confined to this room, to this bed, to this failing body that betrayed him with every labored breath.
Kayn's fingers trembled as he raised the tablet above his face, the movement sending ribbons of pain through his atrophied muscles. The device's weight, barely noticeable to most, demanded every ounce of his strength. Still, he persisted. The novel beckoned, its digital pages the only doorway he could still traverse.
"Morithia: Chronicles of the Seven Seeds," glowed on the screen. Chapter 1,217. He had read the previous 1,216 chapters three times over.
Outside his window, rain tapped a soft rhythm against the glass. Kayn found its cadence oddly comforting, like the heartbeat of a world he would never truly experience. The medical equipment surrounding his bed hummed and beeped in discordant harmony, marking the irregular rhythm of his continued existence.
"Still reading that fantasy nonsense?" His mother's voice broke the relative silence as she entered, carrying a tray of medications. Her face bore the weathered look of someone who had spent decades watching her child die by inches. "The doctor has adjusted your dosage again."
Kayn lowered the tablet to his chest. "The nonsense, as you call it, is the only thing keeping me sane," he replied, his voice a papery whisper. "In Morithia, there are no incurable diseases. Only challenges to overcome through cultivation and will."
She sighed—that familiar, resigned sound he had grown to resent. The sigh that said: if only you would accept reality. But reality had never offered Kayn anything worth accepting.
"Your father called," she said, changing the subject as she organized the rainbow of pills into their designated compartments. "He's sorry he couldn't make it today. The conference in Berlin—"
"Demanded his attention. Yes, I know." Kayn finished for her, his thin lips curving into what might have been a smile on a healthier face. "The brilliant Dr. Harlow, too essential to the medical community to spend time with the son he couldn't save."
His mother's hands stilled. "That's not fair, Kayn."
"Fairness is a concept I abandoned long ago," he replied, eyes drifting back to his tablet. "Like hope. Like dreams of a future. What use are they to me?"
In Morithia, the protagonist Wei Shen had just discovered a rare Void Concept Seed, allowing him to manipulate space itself. The power to move mountains with a thought. Meanwhile, Kayn couldn't lift himself from his bed without assistance.
The irony wasn't lost on him.
His mother finished with the medications and approached his bedside, pressing cool fingers against his forehead—checking for fever, an automatic gesture after so many years of illness.
"The new treatment might show results this time," she said, the hope in her voice a fragile thing. "Dr. Kostas seemed optimistic."
"Dr. Kostas has seemed optimistic about seventeen different treatments," Kayn replied, not looking up from his screen. "Yet here I remain, withering."
She withdrew her hand as if burned. After twenty-seven years, she still hadn't grown accustomed to his coldness. Perhaps she still searched for traces of the bright-eyed child he'd been before the disease had manifested, before they'd discovered that his body was systematically destroying itself through some cruel genetic joke.
"I'll bring your lunch in an hour," she said finally, retreating toward the door.
Kayn didn't respond, already lost again in the world of Morithia, where the weak could become strong through determination and insight, where physical limitations were merely obstacles to be overcome. Where a man's worth was measured by his cunning and his cultivation, not by the frailty of his flesh.
When the door closed behind her, he allowed himself a moment of weakness, a single tear escaping to trace a path down his hollow cheek. Not for himself—he had exhausted self-pity long ago—but for the wasted potential. For the mind trapped in useless flesh. For the strategies and manipulations he crafted in imagination that would never see fruition in reality.
With trembling fingers, he swiped to the next page of the novel, where Wei Shen faced off against the young master of the Crimson Blade Sect. The protagonist was outmatched in raw power, but through clever application of his abilities and reading his opponent's psychology, he emerged victorious.
"Know your enemy better than they know themselves," Wei Shen reflected in the aftermath of battle. "Then victory is merely a matter of exploiting their nature."
Kayn had underlined this passage in his digital notes. If his life had allowed for conflict beyond the daily battle against his deteriorating body, he would have applied this principle ruthlessly. He had always possessed an uncanny ability to read people, to discern their motivations and weaknesses. His mother's desperate need to believe in miracle cures. His father's guilt-ridden avoidance. The rotating cast of doctors, some genuinely compassionate, others viewing him as merely an interesting case study in progressive genetic failure.
Had fate granted him a functional body, he would have been dangerous.
The pain in his chest intensified suddenly, a familiar crushing sensation that signaled one of his episodes approaching. Kayn dropped the tablet to his side and fumbled for the emergency button, fingers suddenly numb and unresponsive.
Not now, he thought as darkness crept into the edges of his vision. I need to know how Wei Shen escapes the Blood Emperor's trap.
His fingers found the button just as the convulsions began. The last clear thought before consciousness fled was not of his mother or father, not of regrets or unfinished business in this world that had offered him nothing but suffering.
It was of Morithia. Of power. Of a world where strength of will determined one's fate.
Of a world where he would never be weak again.
Death arrived not with darkness, but with light—blinding, all-encompassing. Not with silence, but with a cacophony of beeping monitors and shouted medical jargon. Not with peace, but with violent convulsions that arched Kayn's back off the bed as the medical team fought to stabilize him.
"We're losing him!" A voice called out, professional calm fracturing around the edges.
Kayn heard it as if from underwater, distant and distorted. He felt strangely detached, watching from somewhere above as they worked over his body—the husk that had imprisoned him for twenty-seven years now finally, mercifully failing.
He should have felt fear, or perhaps relief. Instead, he felt only a cold, analytical curiosity about what might come next.
As the monitor flatlined and the frantic activity around his body intensified, Kayn's awareness began to dissolve. The sick room, the doctors, his weeping mother in the hallway—all faded into insignificance.
His last thought, before existence itself seemed to unravel around him, was oddly lucid:
If reincarnation exists, let me awaken in a world where power is attainable. Where the strength of one's mind can forge reality itself. Where I will never be helpless again.
The universe, in its infinite cruelty or perhaps its cosmic humor, was listening.
And then—sensation. New and overwhelming.
Warm liquid surrounding him. Pressure. Movement. Sound—muffled but growing clearer.
Light, painfully bright after darkness.
Cold air against wet skin.
A first breath, burning in new lungs.
And the cry of an infant—his cry—echoing with the perfect, impossible clarity of an adult mind trapped within.
Kayn Delacroix opened his eyes for the first time in his new life, golden hair still damp against his head, blue eyes with their distinctive cross-shaped pupils blinking in confusion and wonder.
Around him, voices exclaimed in awe.
"Look at his eyes! Such a unique pattern!"
"Truly a blessed child of House Delacroix!"
"The Third Young Master will surely achieve greatness in his cultivation!"
Through the haze of infant senses adjusting to existence, one thought crystallized in Kayn's fully conscious, adult mind:
Cultivation. House Delacroix.
Morithia.
The impossible had happened. The universe had answered his final, desperate wish with cruel precision.
And in that moment, still wrapped in birthing cloths and held in unfamiliar arms, Kayn began to plan.