It was summer, but this was bleak country near the North Murk Sea, and the nights still ran cold. The broadleaf forest was thick with growth. From somewhere inside the Lia Fellwood came the sounds of magical beasts — low and constant — and the moon kept slipping behind clouds, its light thin and unreliable.
At the forest's edge stood a castle without a single lamp burning. No lights within, no lights without. Twisted trees crowded the ground around it, their shapes wrong against the normal forest, as though they had come from somewhere else entirely. From deep inside the castle, barely audible, came the sound of murmured chanting.
Nicolai Ashton, death mage, was performing the Lich-Transformation Ritual.
He had no other option. He had struck eight of the Prime Church's cathedrals, but Menzel's single blow had shattered him. He had survived the journey back through sheer depth of cultivation and nothing more. He was not willing to die — he was still young, or so he believed, nearly forty but convinced that was young. Florine. The need for revenge. He could not bring himself to go quietly, and so in desperation he was attempting the Ritual before he had the power to complete it safely.
It was dangerous. His level was insufficient. But his body had left him no time.
*Great Death God Hedi, your devoted servant Nicolai Ashton prays to you — let the Ritual succeed.*
On the altar, a Soul Vessel fashioned from Mithril and Obsidian gleamed with quiet light. Before the idol of the Death God, offerings had been laid. He knelt and chanted, and the grey-black fog thickened and rose around him, beginning to take a shape.
Outside, the moon went behind a cloud. Wind picked up. The sounds of magical beasts went suddenly silent, replaced by something else — a low sound, like the keening of ghosts.
The chanting accelerated. The black fog formed a figure, and a face appeared inside it — agonized, twisted — as black energy poured from the kneeling man into the fog. Ashton had been thin to begin with. He looked like skin stretched over bones.
The chanting became frantic. The figure in the fog grew solid, condensed, collapsed into a point of light — and shot into the Soul Vessel. The vessel blazed with deep black radiance.
A smile crossed Ashton's face. On a face that looked like that, a smile was not a pleasant thing to see. Then the smile stopped. He fell without a sound. At the same moment the Soul Vessel made a single sharp crack and broke apart into several pieces. Black smoke drifted upward and dissipated.
After a while, he moved again. But the soul inside was no longer Nicolai Ashton.
Evan woke. He had transmigrated.
He was eighteen years old. He had spent most of those years in a hospital bed, though he had managed to finish his secondary schooling. His family had money — enough to keep him comfortable — but a terminal illness had made everything beside the point. He had lain in the private ward with a flat screen above him, a wireless mouse in his hand, reading a western fantasy novel, thinking: *not long now. If I could transmigrate after death — if only.* His own name appeared constantly in stories like these, always in minor roles.
The screen jumped. A new page appeared: *Please select a destination world.* Two options: Western Fantasy, Eastern Cultivation. He stared at it, decided it was worth trying, and clicked Western Fantasy. Another screen appeared: choose a class. Mage, warrior, Lich, and more. He thought: *if there's a next life, I want to be a Lich — they say Liches don't die.* He clicked it. Everything went dark. When it cleared, the world had changed.
Before he could take in his surroundings, something enormous crashed into him — a wave of memories, rushing in all at once. Some passed through too quickly to hold. Some were sharp and clear. Some were already gone, the shallow impressions dissolved. What remained, beneath the hatred Ashton had carried, was the man's learning. Evan sank into the flood of it and let it wash over him.
After a long time, his eyes moved.
This world resembled Earth's late medieval period, but wasn't quite that — closer to the eve of the Renaissance, though with magic running through everything and no single unified system. The broad division was between white magic and black magic. White magic was close to the original form of the art, practiced in healing and ritual and defense, though still capable of offensive applications. Black magic was the killing tradition, developed in the wars of an older era and spread through the world since, though it was not inherently evil — most working mages, strictly speaking, practiced forms of it. These categories came from the major religions, particularly the clergy, who claimed white magic for themselves.
The more widely accepted division was by element. Multiple elements had been present in the world since creation: white light, green-blue wind, red fire, blue water, yellow earth, pale-blue lightning, black dark — and beyond these, the mysterious elements of space and time. All of this was in Ashton's memory, though Evan had no way to know yet what was accurate.
The memory held magical arrays. Alchemy. Much else. Ashton had been a death mage, dark element as his primary, currently at the ninth level. The classification ran: Magic Apprentice, levels one through three, requiring a wand or focus for anything significant; Mage, levels four through six, capable of casting without a wand through gesture and incantation alone; Senior Mage, levels seven through nine, in which the mage condensed an elemental core — a virtual structure within the body, forming in the brain, the heart, the abdomen, or anywhere else, usually roughly spherical — and became a genuinely advanced practitioner; Arcanist, levels ten through twelve, in which the element acquired its own will. Beyond that: Legend, Demigod. Of those upper ranks, Ashton's memory grew thin.
Evan absorbed what there was, skimmed the rest, and thought nothing much of Ashton's story. The man was dead. His feud with the Prime Church was irrelevant. What mattered was that the botched ritual had created an opening, and he had walked through it.
He let out a slow breath.
The next moment, his expression changed. Even on a Lich's face, the color draining was visible.
He had paid no particular attention to the memories about Ashton's war with the Prime Church, and so he had paid no attention to what the Prime Church actually was. Now, as the hatred in those memories brought the suppressed knowledge to the surface, he understood. An organization that had held the West Tyrone Continent for eighteen hundred years. Unlike the institutions it resembled on Earth, this one had actual divine backing. It had risen from a minor local faith, swept aside all competition, and made itself the dominant religious power of the continent. Its strength was not metaphorical.
An image formed in his mind, clear and uninvited: himself, captured by the Inquisition, lashed to a pyre, fire rising around him.
He was near the point of cursing out loud. But it had happened, and here he was in Ashton's body, and the Inquisition had almost certainly already received their orders. This place was far from the Holy Capital Yidu — even a fast rider would need a month to cover the distance, and there was forest in the way. Two months before anyone arrived.
That was something. He let himself breathe.
Then something else caught his attention. A practice method buried in his mind — unfamiliar, unlike anything in Ashton's memory. Even its name was absent.
Was this the transmigrator's bonus? The standard gift to people in his situation?
He turned his attention to it. A diagram of sorts: the organs, and between them, currents moving like water. Beginning at the kidneys — black energy flowing into the liver, shifting to green; into the heart, becoming red; into the spleen, becoming yellow; into the lungs, becoming white; returning to the kidneys, completing the cycle, beginning again.
The moment he looked at it, something inside him started moving on its own. A cool current, running through his organs in the sequence the diagram showed. He startled — then realized there was no harm in it. He shook his head slightly. This was the bonus? It seemed to do nothing visible. The current continued, indifferent to whether he wanted it to or not.
He set it aside. He would deal with it later.
His gaze drifted to the altar, where the broken pieces of the Soul Vessel lay. He hadn't paid attention at first. Then he looked again.
He was a Lich. With no Soul Vessel.
Which meant he had only one life. No resurrection. No coming back.
Evan went completely still.