"Demon Cannibal, you have no one to blame but yourself for this. Hand over the fragment of the old dreams, and this enmity will end with your life alone" 

"Be reasonable, Ancestor Demon. We have you surrounded. You don't have the strength to claim an artifact from forgotten eras with your current strength"

"Enough with your words; this demon has shed enough innocent blood. Let's just kill him and be done with it. Let him not taint this world a second longer"

...

Around Teival, dozens of enemies surround him. His body is covered in wounds, with his bloody robes ripped to shreds.

There are burns and lacerations, frostbite, and myriad other effects that could be seen in his body. His long black hair sheened dark crimson under the light of the moon and waved lightly like a flag under the mountain breeze.

He stood tall and proud despite the dark blood pooling beneath him; on his right hand, a large butcher's knife cracked and glowed in an eerie light, its serrated edges tainted with black blood. 

On the other is a fragment of what seems to be a statue. A small gray crystal rock that that shows an infantile face broken off from the neck that grimaced into a horrific pained expression. Mystical lights manifested around the fragment that appeared and disappeared, and along with it, the features of the face changed to a different pained expression each time.

Teival understood that he could die here today. There was no way out. But even in the face of death, his expression simply showed a calm smile.

He had refined the artifact, The fragment of the Old dreams, and artifact from times forgotten before the empyrean era. A fragment of a treasure from the dark history that had been forcefully erased from the minds of the generation of the succeeding eras.

Tevial let his eyes wander around him. At the wary gazes of the leaders and elites of the orthodox path. All Heroes and legends of their generation. They were wary. They had done their all, revealed trump cards and mystical means to try and take him down before he could use the artifact in his hands.

But they were too late. It took Tevial his all. Both refining the artifact and fighting for his life to get to this moment. Just one mistake was all it would have taken, and he would have lost it all.

This result was just one of the many that he had foreseen. It was now or never. If he failed, he had no regrets, it would simply mean that he was not strong enough and smart enough to survive in this dog-eat-dog world.

His shoulders shook. Everyone who saw it tensed and readied themselves for what could possibly be Tevial's final desperate attack. The leaders of the orthodox forces would not let him leave even if it cost them their lives. 

The light of the moon cast its rays around the battlefield. A plateau devastated by the intense battle filled the area with craters and bodies of the dead.

Understanding that there were only a few more breaths of life left within him, Tevial raised his hand along with the fragment and pushed all his vital energy into the artifact, and gave off a satisfied smile as he placed his life into the artifact's hands.

Memories of his life started to flash through his eyes as a faint golden glow flowed from the artifact towards his whole body and started intensifying into a radiating light.

The forces around him acted at this same instant and launched their attacks at the still-standing Tevial. Massive explosions of ice, fire and other elements gathered around their target before he disappeared into smoke as though absorbed into a small hole.

The leaders of the orthodox forces dumbfoundedly stared at the place where Tevial disappeared before suddenly their surroundings started to get blurry and turn into wistful smoke before everyone and everything started to disappear too, turning to the same wistful smoke that Tevial had turned to before turning into nothingness.

In the end, everything simply became a dream.

...

At night, a full moon silently cast its rays over a mountain, its vast body housed several clans and villages that shone a hundred tiny lights all over as though a litany of fireflies.

In boar meat village, situated around the foot of the huge mountain, a lone child around 8 years old woke up in a small ratted bamboo house, as he opened his eyes. His normal deep brown turned smokey gray before slowly transitioning to abyss-like black; an infantile face seemingly in anguish can be seen reflected in the abyss of his eyes appeared for an instant before disappearing. In his head, a millennium-long dream had just come to an end.

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"It is not the end..."

A childish voice whispered gleefully. "I, Tevial, has been reborn for the third time. My path to Eternity has yet to be broken"

Just as he said, Tevial had already been reborn before, he was a young adult from earth whose lost soul had been snatched into this realm by otherworldly forces that he had yet to understand.

He was back to the starting point from when his soul had been put into this 8-year-old child's body. He was 23 years old than when it happened, not too young, to not know how to take care of himself despite being displaced into a younger body and not too old to be set on his ways when it comes to adapting to a new world.

And now, for the third time, he has more than what he had for experience compared to before. A thousand years in this world and some years more or less.

"To turn the past thousand years into a dream" Tevial muttered, even though it had happened to him. It still astounded him that such an artifact of power could exist. He only had a fragment, but what if he had the whole thing?

Would it allow him to do more? 

He could only grin excitedly at the thought. Despite having lived for a millennium, he was still just scratching the surface of the unknowns of this world.

Nothing is impossible truly, he sighed as he stretched his arms, palms splayed as he pointed to the sky. His eyes looked through the holes of his roof as he imagined grasping the sky with his hands.

The sound of whistling winds going through the cracks of his small ratted house filled his ears. His eyes glazed as he reminisced the last time he had been as poor as he is now.

Shaking his head at the thought, Tevial started to recount his past. There were a lot of things to do. Important stuff to remember and artifacts and cultivation resources to steal, but that is a bit for the future when he has the power to seize lost opportunities before now.

He had to survive as a mortal and then start his journey to become a cultivator before anything else. With those thoughts, Tevial sat on his sorry excuse of a straw bed and started meditating.

Such an action has little effect on mortals but given the vast amounts of things he has to remember. He has to give time for his brain to consolidate all his memories and use some basic level techniques to keep himself from forgetting.

“Good thing I’ve ransacked some techniques from those mind cultivators; even though they were useless to me as a heart cultivator in my previous life, they are vital to me now”

The world he had transmigrated to had three main types of cultivators, the most numerous of which are body cultivators who have formed their core in their dantian, whose bodily strength are tremendous and have incredible storage capacity for qi to cast their techniques.

The second are heart cultivators, whose bodily strengths are unmatched but have an average capacity for storing qi. Although they are weaker when it comes to throwing fire and calling out lightning. Heart cultivators cultivate the self; weapon users like sword cultivators are usually just heart cultivators who strive to break the gap between the self and their sword, wielding them as though an extension of themselves.

The third are mind cultivators, the most mysterious and elusive type of cultivator. Mind cultivators focus their qi into their brains; they have inhumane levels of speed when it comes to thinking; they are usually planners or scouts and have innumerable esoteric abilities depending on which aspect of the mind they focus on.

The pinnacle of mind cultivators could scheme plans years ahead; in combat, they could be ten steps ahead when planning their moves. Calculating innumerable factors and having backup plans behind backup plans. The more information they have, the stronger they are. Although this kind of godlike ability comes with drawbacks.

If there weren’t some, everyone would have wanted to be a mind cultivator. The heaven’s are impartial; mind cultivators have the weakest bodily strength and could be easily killed if caught unawares. They also have the least amount of storage for qi.

Not only that, but it is also the most dangerous type of cultivation, followed by heart cultivation and then body cultivation. A mistake in their cultivation could lead to death for mind cultivators, their brains turning to soup or if fortunate, turning them into simpletons. Their minds become slower than even the dumbest of mortals.

For heart cultivators, mistakes could lead to their heart exploding which summarily leads to death in most cases, while mistakes for body cultivators would usually just lead to the person becoming crippled.

Tevial himself had been forced to use the fragment of the old dreams after becoming cornered by no doubt a scheme from a mind cultivator. The best way to fight those kinds of cultivators is never showing up and never leaving a trace for them to deduce and plan against you.

He truly had offended a lot of people in his previous life with his way of living. Fortunately, Tevial knows about them now while they themselves are unaware of him. Anonymity was his most significant advantage now, and he would make it last as long as he could while killing those mind cultivators before they could ever reach their apex.

With all his memories, all kinds of treasures and precious items that no one has even discovered were ripe for his taking. In his time, there were countless heroes and legends born in the past thousand years. 

Geniuses and hidden masters that weren’t even born yet were also ripe for his reaping, he thought darkly.

Tevial had an undeniable grasp over his situation; with good planning and skillful execution, he could empower himself and reach farther than ever before to break through the most profound boundaries of cultivation.

Slowly, Tevial combed through his memories. A thousand years was a relatively long period of time, and not to mention, he could associate little but muddled memories back when he was just starting; not everything could be recalled, and there is also the issue of the location being separated by distance and also can only be accessed over a certain period of time.

And also, he shouldn’t forget that those priceless treasures and inheritances were useless to him if he didn’t even have the power to take them. 

The problem now was first to strengthen his mind and then himself to decide his course of action after that. 

Hours passed, Tevial practiced the basics of the Mind palace technique. Segregating his memories to what is most important and valuable to his current situation, using different mnemonic systems that he could remember from the technique to help him catalog and organize his memories.

Sighing, Tevial opened his eyes, his was skin pale and his mind tired from mental exhaustion associated with the technique. His hand reached up to his nose and saw blood on his fingers. 

“Even just the mortal preparatory technique is already too much for me”

Looking at his skinny arms, Tevial shook his head before standing up. As an orphan, his body was weak and malnourish, if he tried too hard with the technique, he might kill himself trying to push his mind. So first, he has to keep his mortal body healthy before trying any further with the technique. There are countless treasures that could help strengthen his memories and help with his recollection, so he shouldn’t be too hasty for now.

“I wonder if the old man is awake now?”