Summer it may have been, but the nights were cold on this desolate stretch of land near the Northern Sea. The broadleaf forest was in full growth, and the wood known as the Liya Demon Forest rang constantly with the cries of magical beasts. The moon gave little light — clouds kept drifting across it — and along the edge of that sprawling forest stood a castle without a single lamp burning. For several li in every direction, gnarled trees rose in twisted shapes that seemed to belong to another world entirely, as though something from hell had taken root there. Inside the castle, the servants had long since shut themselves in their rooms, pressing their ears to the doors and listening. From somewhere deeper within, a low, murmuring chant drifted through the walls.
The necromancer Nicholas Andrew was performing the lich transformation ritual. He had no choice. He had struck at eight churches of the Creationist Church, but Cardinal Mainz's blow had left him with wounds beyond recovery, his life force nearly spent. That he had managed to make it back at all spoke to the depth of his cultivation. He refused to accept it — he was still young, nearly thirty, which he considered young — and between his longing for Philomena and his hunger for revenge, he did not want to die. With no other option, he forced the ritual to begin.
It was a desperate gamble. His strength was not sufficient for the transformation, but his body could no longer wait.
Death God Hadir, great and sovereign — your faithful servant Nicholas Andrew prays for your blessing. Let the transformation succeed.
He had no choice but to try.
On the altar sat a soul vessel of mithril and obsidian, glinting with a faint and mysterious light. Before the statue of the Death God lay offerings. Nicholas Andrew knelt, his voice rising and falling in a chanted incantation, and the grey-black fog thickened around him until it had swallowed him whole.
Outside, the moonlight dimmed. A dark cloud moved across the moon. The wind picked up and began to howl, and the cries of the magical beasts went abruptly silent — replaced by something else, a low sound, like spirits mourning.
The chanting quickened. The black fog took shape. A figure began to form within it, its face twisted in agony, and the dark energy pouring from Nicholas Andrew's kneeling body flowed steadily into that shape. He had always been thin; now, as the black energy drained from him, he looked like nothing but skin stretched over bone.
His voice grew more urgent. The figure in the fog grew clearer, solidified, condensed into a mass of light and shadow — and plunged into the soul vessel. The soul vessel blazed with a deep black radiance.
A smile crossed Nicholas Andrew's face. On those skeletal features it looked horrifying. Then the smile froze, and without a sound he collapsed. At the same moment, the soul vessel cracked apart with a sharp report, and black smoke curled upward and dissolved.
After a moment, the body stirred again — but the soul inside it was no longer Nicholas Andrew's.
Evan woke up. He had crossed over.
He was eighteen years old , and for most of his life he had spent the better part of each year in a hospital bed. He had barely managed to finish secondary school. His parents were wealthy — he could have lived as a pampered idler — but fate had given him a terminal illness instead. They had provided every comfort money could buy, but his life could not be saved. He had spent his days in a private ward, lying back against the pillows with a wireless mouse in hand, a LCD screen on the wall above him, reading a Western fantasy novel. He remembered thinking, not long before the end, that he didn't have much time left — and wouldn't it be something if he could transmigrate after he died. His name appeared in novels often enough, after all, even if only as a bit player.
Then the screen had flickered and jumped to a new page: an interactive selection screen.
Please choose your transmigration world.
Two options. A Western fantasy world, or an Eastern cultivation world.
Evan had stared at it. Then, figuring he had nothing to lose, he clicked Western fantasy. Another screen appeared: choose your class. Mage, warrior, lich, and others. He thought — if I'm going to die anyway, and there's a next life, I want to be a lich. Liches are supposed to be immortal. He clicked lich. Everything went dark.
And now here he was.
Before he could take in his surroundings, his head filled with a roaring sound and a flood of memories crashed over him like a tide. Some flashed past too quickly to grasp. Others were clear. Others still had already faded — the shallower impressions dissolving first, leaving behind the deep-carved ones: hatred, and knowledge. Everything Nicholas Andrew had learned. Evan sank into it and was lost for a long while.
When he surfaced, he began to understand the world he'd landed in. It resembled Earth's medieval period, but not quite — closer to the eve of a Renaissance, yet with magic woven through it, dozens of schools and traditions with no unified standard. The broadest division was between white magic and black magic. White magic was closest to the original form of the craft as used in religious ceremony and healing — effective in mending wounds and defending against enemies, though it had its offensive applications too. Black magic was the harder-edged tradition, developed in an earlier age of warfare and spread across the world; despite the name, it was not inherently evil. In honest terms, most working mages fell into the black magic category. The distinction itself came from the major religions, and the clergy were the ones most likely to call themselves white mages.
The more widely accepted classification divided magic by element. This was what most mages used. Since the age of creation, the world had been suffused with multiple elements: white for light, green for wind, red for fire, blue for water, yellow for earth, pale blue for lightning, black for dark, and the mysterious elements of space and time. All of this lived in Evan's head now, though he wasn't certain how accurate any of it was — this world and Earth were plainly not the same.
The memories also contained magical arrays, alchemy, and more. Nicholas Andrew had been a necromancer, primarily a practitioner of the dark element, and had reached the ninth level. The ranking system applied to all mages regardless of school: Magic Apprentice, Mage, Senior Mage, Arcanist, and beyond those the tiers of Legend and Demigod. Levels one through three were Magic Apprentice — at this stage, a mage needed a staff or catalyst to cast even basic spells. Levels four through six were Mage, the stage of elemental attunement, where spells could be cast with gestures and words alone, no staff required. Levels seven through nine were Senior Mage, the stage of elemental core — at this point the mage had condensed an elemental core within their body, a virtual structure that could form in the mind, the heart, the abdomen, or anywhere else, most commonly spherical, and its formation marked the true crossing into advanced mastery. Levels ten through twelve were Arcanist, where the element itself developed something like will. As for Legend and Demigod — Nicholas Andrew hadn't known much about those.
Once he'd worked through the memories, Evan skimmed the rest and didn't dwell on them. He had no interest in avenging Nicholas Andrew. The man was dead, and that was that. As for why he'd attempted the transformation — the fool had picked a fight with the Creationist Church over a woman, nearly had his soul obliterated for it, and then tried to become a lich without the power to manage it. His loss was Evan's gain.
Evan let out a slow breath. He had no intention of carrying on Nicholas Andrew's vendetta. But in the next moment his face changed — even a dead man's face could go pale — and whatever satisfaction he'd felt at transmigrating into a lich evaporated entirely.
He hadn't paid much attention to the memories about the Creationist Church, and so he hadn't paid much attention to what it meant. But now, carried along by the deep current of Nicholas Andrew's hatred, those buried recollections surfaced in full clarity. The Creationist Church had dominated Tarenxi for eighteen hundred years. Unlike anything on Earth, this was a religion with genuine divine backing — a faith that had risen from a minor local sect to sweep away all rivals and become the continent's ruling religious power, its strength beyond easy reckoning.
An image rose in Evan's mind unbidden: himself, caught by the Creationist Church, lashed to a pyre, flames climbing all around him. He very nearly swore out loud at whoever had arranged this transmigration. But it had happened, and here he was, wearing Nicholas Andrew's body — and the Holy Inquisition had almost certainly already been dispatched. At least the distance from here to Holy Eton was substantial; even at a hard gallop it would take a month, and there was forest in between. No one would arrive in under two months.
That thought steadied him slightly. Two months was enough time to run.
He'd deal with tomorrow tomorrow. But wait — there was something in his mind, a technique of some kind, unlike anything else in his memory. It had no name. It wasn't part of Nicholas Andrew's knowledge at all. What was it?
A protagonist's cheat, maybe. The standard benefit that came with transmigration. He turned his attention to it. The technique was unlike anything in this world's magic — not a spell, but a diagram. Currents like water flowing between his organs: beginning at the kidneys, black energy flowing into the liver and becoming green, green into the heart and becoming red, red into the spleen and becoming yellow, yellow into the lungs and becoming white, white back into the kidneys — one full cycle, endlessly repeating.
The moment he looked at it, the energy in his organs simply began to move. Cool, almost pleasant. And once it started, it wouldn't stop. He was startled, but nothing else happened. He shook his head. This was the cheat? It didn't seem to do anything.
The energy kept circling on its own, beyond his control. Evan watched it for a moment and let it be. He didn't know yet that no technique worth having shows its value in a day or two.
He turned his attention to the altar in front of him, and his gaze drifted across it without particular interest — until it caught on the shattered soul vessel.
He looked away. Then stopped.
He looked back.
He was a lich. Without a soul vessel.
Which meant he had only one life. No resurrection. No immortality.
For a long moment, Evan's mind went completely blank.