Chapter 2 — A Man Who Should Not Exist

  Khain woke to the smell of iron and herbs.

  For a moment he assumed he had died again. The weakness spreading through his body felt familiar enough for it. Awareness returned slowly, dragging him up through the fog one piece at a time. The first thing he noticed was the ceiling. It was no longer the cracked mural of angels from the Valcrest bedroom. Rough wooden beams crossed overhead instead, darkened by years of smoke, with a lantern hanging from one of them that cast steady, dim light across the room.

  The second thing he noticed was pain.

  It pulsed steadily through the left side of his body where his arm had once been. The sensation wasn’t sharp enough to be agony, but every heartbeat reminded him the limb was gone. Khain exhaled quietly.

  “Good,” he muttered.

  The word sounded strange in his throat, but the feeling behind it was genuine. For four centuries he had fought with a single arm, and his entire style of swordsmanship had been built around that absence. Two-handed fighters relied on leverage, pushing power through both arms in coordinated motion. That approach had never belonged to him. His technique relied on rotation through the hips and shoulders, letting his entire body move as a single continuous line. His strikes were shorter, sharper, and brutally efficient. A second arm had always been a complication. Now the problem was corrected.

  Khain turned his head slightly and discovered he was lying in a narrow bed against the wall of a modest room. A small table stood beside him with a basin of cloudy water and several strips of blood-stained cloth. Someone had wrapped the stump where his arm had been severed in layered bandages.

  He studied the wrappings for several seconds.

  The work was neat. Not the frantic patching of a panicked servant, but careful stitching reinforced with herbal paste and layered cloth. Whoever had done it knew enough medicine to keep him alive. That narrowed the possibilities considerably.

  “Awake already?”

  The voice came from the doorway.

  Khain shifted his gaze toward it and found Seren Vale leaning against the frame with her arms crossed. The travel armor she had worn earlier was gone, replaced by simple clothes and a leather belt carrying a short sword. Her eyes studied him the way a hunter studied something dangerous.

  Khain considered her calmly.

  “You kept me alive,” he said.

  Seren snorted and pushed away from the door. “Barely.”

  She stepped into the room and pulled a wooden chair closer to the bed before sitting down beside him. A moment later she gestured toward the bandage around his arm. “You lost a lot of blood,” she said. “Most people would have died.”

  Khain shrugged slightly. “Most people don’t cut off their own arm.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  Seren leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as she watched him carefully. “I’ve fought for ten years,” she continued. “I’ve seen soldiers lose limbs. I’ve seen mercenaries butcher themselves to stop poison spreading. I’ve seen desperate things.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly.

  “I have never seen someone calmly remove their own arm during a duel.”

  Khain said nothing.

  Silence stretched between them for several seconds before Seren leaned back in her chair and let out a slow breath.

  “Let’s start with something simple,” she said. “Who are you?”

  Khain looked up at the wooden beams above them. The question wasn’t easy to answer. He could have told her the truth—that he had lived for two thousand years in another world, walked the path of cultivation until his power shook mountains, and died surrounded by enemies who feared what he had become.

  That explanation would have sounded insane.

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  So he chose a different answer.

  “A man who died.”

  Seren stared at him. “That’s not helpful.”

  “It’s accurate.”

  She tapped the wooden floor lightly with the heel of her boot. “Then let me rephrase. You aren’t Ardyn Valcrest. That much is obvious. The man I knew couldn’t swing a sword without tripping over his own boots.”

  Khain remained silent.

  Seren leaned forward again. “But you know things Ardyn shouldn’t know,” she continued. “You move like someone who’s fought their entire life. And when you look at people…” She paused, searching for the right word. “…you look at them like they’re problems to solve.”

  Khain finally turned his head and looked at her again. “You came to kill Ardyn.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  Seren frowned slightly. “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “No,” Khain agreed. “But it explains why I’m still here.”

  She stared at him for several seconds before shaking her head slowly. “You’re impossible.”

  Khain didn’t disagree.

  The room fell quiet again until Seren eventually stood and walked to the small window across the room. She pushed the shutters open, letting sunlight spill inside. Dust floated through the air in slow drifting patterns.

  “You’ve been unconscious for two days,” she said without turning around.

  Khain blinked once. Two days was longer than he expected.

  “Your father’s estate servants assumed you’d finally drunk yourself to death,” Seren continued. “I didn’t correct them.”

  Khain nodded slightly. “That was efficient.”

  Seren glanced back over her shoulder. “You’re strangely calm for someone who just lost an arm.”

  “I’ve had worse mornings.”

  She turned back to the window. “That’s the problem.”

  Khain waited.

  “When I came to your house,” she said slowly, “I expected to find a coward hiding behind servants.” Her gaze drifted toward the distant hills beyond the estate. “Instead I found someone who disarmed me in three moves and cut off his own arm like it was nothing.”

  Khain tilted his head slightly. “That seems like a clear improvement.”

  Seren laughed once. It wasn’t a happy sound.

  “You’re not wrong,” she admitted.

  She turned around again and studied him carefully. “But it raises another problem.”

  Khain waited.

  “If you’re not Ardyn,” she said, “then what do I do with you?”

  Khain considered the question seriously.

  “Feed me.”

  Seren blinked. “That’s your answer?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at him for several seconds before rubbing her face with one hand. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “Also water.”

  Seren muttered something under her breath and walked out of the room.

  A few minutes later she returned with a bowl of thin stew and a cup of water, setting them on the table beside the bed. Khain pushed himself upright slowly. The motion made the room tilt for a moment, but he ignored it. Weakness was expected after blood loss.

  He picked up the spoon with his remaining hand and began eating.

  Seren watched him closely.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  Khain swallowed another mouthful before answering. “Surprise is inefficient.”

  Seren rolled her eyes. “That might be the most irritating philosophy I’ve ever heard.”

  Khain finished the bowl without replying and set it aside. His gaze drifted to the bandaged stump of his arm again. Something still bothered him. He closed his eyes briefly and searched inward.

  Nothing answered.

  No circulation of power. No pressure beneath the bones. No quiet current of energy flowing through his body.

  His cultivation was gone.

  Khain opened his eyes slowly.

  That was… inconvenient.

  Seren noticed the shift in his expression. “What?”

  Khain shook his head slightly. “Nothing that can be solved immediately.”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  Instead of answering, Khain swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood.

  The moment his feet touched the floor his body protested violently. His muscles trembled and his balance wavered as weakness flooded through him.

  Khain waited until the shaking stopped.

  Seren stared at him in disbelief. “You’re not seriously thinking about moving already.”

  “Yes.”

  “You almost died.”

  “I noticed.”

  Khain took a careful step forward, then another. The body was worse than he expected. Ardyn Valcrest had clearly never exercised in his life—soft muscles, poor balance, terrible endurance.

  Khain stopped beside the window and stared out across the estate grounds. The land stretched outward in rolling fields and scattered trees, with distant mountains rising sharply against the sky.

  Seren walked up beside him. “What are you doing?”

  “Planning.”

  “For what?”

  Khain studied the mountains quietly.

  “Training.”

  Seren stared at him as if he had just suggested wrestling a dragon. “You can barely stand.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have one arm.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you nearly died two days ago.”

  “Yes.”

  Seren threw her hands into the air. “And your solution is training?”

  Khain nodded once. “Correct.”

  She stared at him for several seconds before laughing. It started quietly, then grew louder until she had to wipe tears from her eyes.

  “You’re insane,” she said.

  Khain didn’t deny it.

  Seren eventually leaned against the window frame and looked out across the hills. “So what happens now?”

  “For now,” Khain said calmly, “I recover.”

  She nodded slowly. “And after that?”

  Khain’s gaze sharpened slightly as he looked toward the mountains.

  “After that,” he said, “I begin again.”

  Seren studied him carefully. There was something unsettling about the certainty in his voice.

  Like a man describing sunrise.

  “Begin what?” she asked quietly.

  Khain didn’t look away from the distant peaks.

  “The path I already walked once.”

  Seren frowned slightly. “And where does that path end?”

  Khain answered without hesitation.

  “Higher than the gods.”

  The room went silent.

  Seren stared at him for several seconds before letting out a long breath.

  “…I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

  Khain smiled faintly.

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “That would have been easier.”