"—re you even listening, boss?" a young girl in her twelfth or eleventh year said with frustration, amplifying the headache pounding through Neir's skull. "Those Amiri bastards took everything...!"

Neir blinked slowly, confused. He groaned, clutching his forehead. Noticing this, someone held him up straight.

"Are you okay?" the person supporting him whispered into his ears worriedly.

He shook his head gently — partly as a reply to the woman holding him up, and mostly to clear the fog in his mind. The throbbing in his head subsided to a degree.

"Neir?"

"S-Saryl?" Neir replied, hugging the slender woman tightly. He pulled away, staring intently into her dark-brown eyes, studying her face to make sure he wasn't mistaken.

Soft pink lips, placidly narrowed eyes, long lashes, lush, wavy hair with crimson tips that curled upwards slightly, and smooth white skin marred by a few freckles. It was her.  

He gulped, gaze drifting around the decrepit room. There were seventeen poorly dressed children occupying the dimly lit space, all looking at him with concern. Each of them had crimson portions in their hair; each styling it rather uniquely.

The girl that was yelling at him earlier, in particular, had a single, thick braid that fell down the side of her face, down to her shoulder; its red accents splaying apart, burnt.

"...Jenieve," Neir said to the little girl, standing on his own two feet despite the imbalance in his mind. "Continue...no, repeat what you were saying."

"We were robbed. Me, Carlit, and Hano," the girl said softly, bobbing her head side to side nervously. "They took everything, the parcels that the Empress donated to us..."

Neir froze, then cackled out a peal of roaring laughter, cutting off the girl's words, startling most of the people present. Wasn't this just before the Amiri killed most of his ragtag clique members…? 

"When did you hit your head?" Saryl asked when his laughter died down, her words lisped ever so slightly by her Hatien accent. "Should I lay you down?"

"No… I recalled something funny, is all," he said, smiling at her. "As for Jennie's problem, I'll take care of it. There's no need to fret."

Jenieve opened her mouth to say something but closed it when Seryl made a discreet gesture with her hand. She then nodded and scurried out of the room, the rest of the children following behind her.

"What are you planning on doing?" Saryl asked, picking up the broom in the corner of the room and starting to sweep the floor.

Neir hummed, watching her work as if entranced. "...Nothing reckless, if that's what you're thinking," he finally said before the silence shifted from comfortable to strange.

"Is that so?" Saryl asked, idly leaning against the broomstick. She stared at him with a lazy gaze. "...I don't buy it. Try again."

"Believe it or not, I really don't plan on acting on a frenzied whim," Neir said. "Does that surprise you?"

"Oh. It does," Saryl said, her monotone voice suggesting otherwise. "I bet the rest of the riff-raff hanging around here will be surprised too — if they knew stealing from us wouldn't warrant a bloody aftermath."

'Bloody?' Neir chuckled, earning a caustic glare from Saryl. 'If only she knew the meaning of that word; the constant, meaningless, deaths…I’d witnessed.'

Including hers. It happened so many years ago...or was it a few weeks into the future? Neir pressed against his temples, a swelling headache pulsing behind his ears and eyes. The humorous mood he'd been in vanished.

"I'll take care of it," he said firmly, walking out the room to a hallway, then out of the hideout before Saryl could have a word in.

Outside, the nightly air sent chills through Neir's body. He took a few moments to gather his thoughts, then paced onward; focusing purely on the storm ravaging his mindscape. Though the more he did that, the more restless he became.

He'd died.

Now, he was back a few weeks before his life became an eternal nightmare. How was this possible?

'That's not the question I should be tackling,' Neir thought, stopping and looking up at the bright full moon, arms and hands trembling. 'What am I to do here?'

His time had come and passed. He was so tired… Exhausted of trying to survive; of seeing the people he cared for die. He didn't want to go through it again.

He honestly wished to rest.

"Disgusting," the word left Neir's mouth like venom. He clenched his fists hard. "Why not just admit you're afraid of facing that thing again?"

His heart lurched. He recalled what he felt just before his last moments. That thing's Intent. It was as if it wished the world to die — and the Laws governing Wrudalin seemed to warp and bend to satisfy that heinous will.

How does one even fathom destroying a being capable of achieving such a thing?

The answer was simple: one could not.

Tears seared down Neir's cheeks, he felt his psyche wilt as more time went on. Was this some kind of postmortem hallucination? Perhaps, if he was lucky, this would turn out to be something of a nightmare before his soul completely vanished...

Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes, rationality taking over his mind. That wasn't it. It couldn't be. This was real. He could tell that much by feeling how ambient mana interacted with the world.

After forcefully suppressing the turbulence in his mind, Neir glanced around. The streets were empty, safe for the silhouettes of dealers hiding from the moon's bright light in the dark alleyways.

Neir heaved a sigh, relaxing, restarting his gait. A second chance. Surely there was meaning to this. He walked for a long while, taking arbitrary turns down streets as he appreciated the sight of his home city.

Before long, the old soul found an empty alleyway he could use as a spot for respite. He leaned against a building, unbothered by the thin film of grime painting its walls.

"If I were to do something, where should I start?" Neir mumbled, feeling inward. His core wasn't formed, and his essence was yet to be weaved. It seemed he'd be starting from scratch.

That could be considered a blessing, rather than a nuisance. In his first life, his foundations could be considered 'shaky' at best and taking in the fact that he'd achieved Apotheosis with such a brittle foundation...It could be said, he was never truly at his full potential. If he exerted too much on his core, it threatened to collapse — therefore, he always placed a subconscious limiter on himself.

'Getting ahead of ourselves, are we?' Neir thought, sparking his soul. Crimson-black flames erupted in his palms, writhing in a destructive dance.

Right.

Instead of focusing on things like mana core formation or essence weaving, he tried to feel for how much of his soul he'd shredded already.

Neir killed off the flame with a thought, smiling fondly at how he stupidly destroyed most of his soul in his teenage years. At that time—this time?—he simply thought he had a special affinity for fire, but in his ignorance; he was actually just destroying that which made him special.

He wouldn't repeat that mistake.

No.

He wouldn't repeat any mistakes. If he was to trudge through this thorny road again, he was to do it with absolute perfection.

If memory served right, this was only a few months after he'd discovered the ability. His soul was intact — well, as 'intact' as it could be after weeks of mindless sparking...fortunately, he didn't have a normal soul.

“Look at you fiddling your own shaft,” Neir said, amused. He scratched his head, sparking his soul again—this time releasing a powerful, transient burst in his legs and feet, blasting himself dozens of meters above the ground. Spinning mid-air, he pushed himself against the surrounding walls and elegantly set foot on a nearby rooftop.

Neir hissed in a deep breath. That hurt more than it needed to. He stomped his feet, and his ankles throbbed numbly. “...See? You’re not all that. Can’t even climb a wall.” He sat, looking ahead tiredly. 

The brilliant moonlight illuminated the entire city resplendently. From up here, even the city of peasants shone with beauty. The picturesque scenery calmed him.

Traversing through time was impossible. Well, that wasn’t true. One could, in theory, leap between different dimensions of aetherspace to arrive at a time different than their original. Doing this, however, posed one insurmountable problem: Temporal Dissonance. 

As a former god, Neir knew most of the secrets of the world, including the fact that every object—be it soul, human, beast, god, demon, masses of land and sea, planet, or even stars—gained a ‘mark’ as they moved through time. If you were to move forward or backward in space-time, your mark wouldn’t match that which you would gain or had at your original time. What happens next is obvious, the Natural Laws would erase you before a paradox could present itself. 

“So, then, how is it I’m here?” Neir mumbled dully, falling to his back and gazing at the starry night sky. “Could all my ‘memories’ be some kind of divination?”

That couldn’t be it either. 

Even if he discarded the fact seeing decades into the future—something that had a boundless number of everchanging possibilities—was improbable, he still would have to explain why he could vividly feel the world’s ambient mana try to cling to him in submission. It yearned to be part of his authority, despite him being a mere mortal.

In the end, all he could do was sigh in resignation. Did it matter? Really? Truly? Whatever explanation he cooked up, he didn’t think it’d change his situation, so he tucked his pointless theories in the back of his head.

It was time to get busy, and to do that, the first thing he was to do was create a mana core. 

Neir smiled.

This time around, he would become a being greater than even the God King Himself.