“What the hell?” I asked as I stared at the reflection in the golden-edged mirror.

I knew what had happened. The information was right there in my head and the reality of it all was as clear as day. But still, some things were just impossible to accept. I was alive. Well, I had died, but apparently, that had changed.

“WHAT THE HELL?” I yelled. The room seemed to be shaking as I touched my face. The man in the mirror did the same.

My name had been Bill Terrance. His name had been Array King Dane. He was living and I was dead. I was a mortal, and he was an immortal. And we were both fine and separated a few moments ago but suddenly we were one and the same

I closed my eyes, trying to steel my nerves. Could this be a dream? Nope. There was too much information in my head for all of this to be a dream. I wouldn’t be able to imagine understanding all of the things I suddenly knew now. How could I imagine reality-bending laws or god-like powers?

“WHAT THE HELL!!” I yelled again, and this time I could tell that the room was shaking. And it was my yelling that caused it.

“Alright. Okay. Alright,” I said, pressing my hand against my chest as I tried to calm myself down. I started parsing through his memories, trying to figure out what had happened.

“Reincarnation? No, not exactly reincarnation. Something else?”

My face scrunched in horror as I realized what had happened.

“Oh damn,” I mumbled, staring disappointedly at the man in the mirror.

It wasn’t quite reincarnation, not really. It was more like a half-assed death if anything. It was more like a botched organ transplant of the soul, except instead of switching out something like the heart or the kidneys, some dumbass had switched out the brains instead.

The dumbass in the mirror stared back.

I’d read books about this, fictional stories about warriors in magic China land and all the great adventures they’d go on. Stories filled with power, women, pain, treasures, tribulations, more women, and an absurd amount of restaurant disputes. But…but those were all stories weren’t they? It was one thing to read fiction and it was another to live it.

I looked the unfamiliar man up and down.

Dane’s body was immortal and infinitely better than mine, but it still felt wrong somehow. I lifted my arm and watched the man in the mirror reflect my actions. It felt strange and almost alien to see something mimic me so well.

But, strange existential horrors aside, he was damn handsome. He had short black hair, a sharp face, and a muscular build. The ethnicity wasn’t something I could put a direct finger on, but it was a mixture of Scandinavian, Asian, and African, though I don’t know if anyone could be described by those labels anymore.

After oogling myself for a bit, my next thought was how. How had this happened? How was this all real? Was this real, or was it some strange dream I was coughing up at three in the morning? It didn’t feel real, but

I got the answer as soon as I thought of the questions.

Fundamental truths of the multiverse and all of reality suddenly sprouted in my head. And for a moment, a temporary but excruciating moment, two different bits of two different souls pressed together as they became one.

It felt like I was thinking for the very first time, as if everything before now had been a hazy barely conscious dream. Knowledge rushed into my head as untold eons of experience pressed against my existence. My understanding of reality was rebuilt and I saw the ends of infinity. The world shrank as I outgrew it and the universe felt small. Laws, Daos, the very fabric of reality, all of it unraveled before my eyes and everything was laid bare.

There weren't words to describe the experience, but I didn't need words. I wasn't thinking in words, and in fact, I wasn't thinking. Thinking seemed too small of a description to explain what was going on in my head. It was enlightenment and understanding far beyond the limits of a mortal. Rebirth. Readjustment. Awakening. No, something even more than that. Something I could only feel and not convey.

And that was when I was truly born. The two separate souls finally clicked together, like puzzle pieces finding their place, and suddenly I felt whole.

I looked back into the mirror and I saw myself staring back. This was the face of Array King Dane, a man who had reached the twelfth rank of cultivation. A man known throughout all of the multiverse, even by those of the seventeenth rank, the God-Imperiums

Dane had reached a rare pinnacle in cultivation, soaring far above most. He was a strong and reclusive cultivator. And he was considered young for his cultivation stage, but everyone in the higher realms were considered to be extremely gifted in one way or another.

But he was different. He had crafted his own legend. He’d fought young masters and stolen treasures from clan elders. He had lived a life of legends and myths, having many adventures and joys, many highs and lows.

Just thinking about the number of things he’d seen in his lifetime would have broken a mortal’s mind. And yet Bill’s life was also there, the strange dullness of it all shining brightly against Dane’s amazing stories. It was strange. You’d think an immortal’s memories would outshine and replace a mortal’s, but each seemed to be equal in my soul, part mortal and part immortal.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

My eyes scanned the Palacium. The place was huge and full of gold resources most would kill to get, yet it was empty. Dane had never been one for company, sexual or platonic.

I looked down at the black ring on my left hand. It was initially a cursed item called the Ring of Repelling. Dane had been cursed with it in his younger years, but he eventually grew fond of the damn thing and strengthened it to work on his higher cultivation stage. The man had been puritanical in how he would deal with sex, and the ring was his way of dealing with women, or "distractions" as he had called them.

It was a little prudish if you asked me, but I was glad that I wouldn’t be inheriting multiple realms' worth of abandoned wives and all the baggage that would have brought. But on the other hand, this did put me in the running for being the multiverse’s oldest virgin.

I decided to take the ring off.

So one might wonder, if Dane was so strong and powerful, how did he die? Was he betrayed? Was he attacked by demonic cultivators who wanted his divine artifacts? Did he blow himself up while fighting off an ancient beast in a pocket dimension?

No. Dane was an Array Master. And one of the fundamental rules of being an Array Master is that you didn’t set up an array in your soul. You could set up an array to contain a soul. You could set up an array to digest or contort a soul, or even set one up on your soul. But you don’t set up an array in your soul, because it just couldn’t be done. It was like trying to plug in a keyboard to your brain, the two just weren’t compatible.

The soul was something of a spiritual body. The body has organs and organ systems that handle certain jobs like delivering nutrients and digesting food. The soul has the same things, but instead of food or nutrients, it dealt with consciousness and all of its complexities. Dane, in his experimentation, had broken his soul and I was the resulting mixture of him and some random piece of consciousness floating in the void.

Now, normally this wouldn’t have been as big of a problem as it was. You could always heal, especially immortals whose very goals revolved around staying alive for as long as you can. Or at least until another immortal found and killed you in secluded meditation, which was bound to happen if you lived forever, but that hadn’t been the case for Dane.

No, Dane had accidentally completely shattered his ego which was like the metaphysical brain of the soul. It defined your sense of self and during that experience parts of Bill’s decaying soul settled into his. After that, Bill's ego took the place of Dane’s, and the rest of them fused together to create whatever abomination I was now.

"You don’t fuck with your own soul," I mumbled, still staring at the mirror.

If I were still Dane, I’d close my eyes, cross my legs, and cultivate for the next few millennia. If I were Bill, I would go out and adventure across the universe, searching for the fantasy-like journey this world could give me.

But I wasn’t either of them. I had Dane’s experience and had seen more magic than people had ever written about back on Earth. And I had Bill’s taste so there was no way I was just going to sit here and do nothing for thousands of years. Besides, it wasn’t like I needed to cultivate. I was already an immortal and even though I wasn’t at the pinnacle of all cultivation, I was more than strong enough to live peacefully and out in the open for a few trillion years.

But there was a problem with that, no matter how long-lasting that peace was, it would always be temporary. That was the nature of cultivation. To cultivate, you need resources, to gain resources you must fight, to fight you must get stronger, and to get stronger you must cultivate. It was an endlessly repeating pattern that everyone in the sport fell to, regardless of power or strength.

Even the God-Imperiums, who were five full stages above me at the seventeenth stage and were capable of spawning universes with one breath and destroying them with another, even they cultivated diligently in fear of one another.

The thought wasn’t just mine, it was something Dane had considered as well. He had grown tired of this world, tired of all the fighting and raging. That was why he was so carelessly playing with arrays in his soul. Dane, in his last moments, had felt indifferent about death and danced with it of his own volition.

I looked away from the reflection and looked around at my surroundings. There wasn’t a lot laying around. Everything in the Palacium automatically sorted itself and the city-sized palace was cleaned and guarded by arrays.

I raised my right hand in front of me and swiped in a grasping motion. A crushing force grew from my hand and a black void grew from my palm, devouring everything from things to light. The Palacium collapsed, vacuuming itself into my closed fist, and in my hand appeared a small black stone containing the depiction of a golden-white castle.

The small barren planet that I’d made my base for the past few hundred thousand years held very little value to me. It was just one of the many rocks I visited, nothing particular about it except for the fact that it was far removed from almost all other life in this universe. There was no sentient life in this universe, though I could feel a rising qi density, so that was bound to change sooner rather than later.

I patted my chest and switched out my robes for some nice stealthy, enchanted, protective clothing, and flew into the sky. As I left the atmosphere, the world beneath me exploded with supernatural energy as array after array activated in the vacating process.

The protective fields disintegrated, and with them, all evidence of me ever being here. The process went on for about an hour before the brown ball beneath me settled down looking as abandoned as the day I’d landed on it.

Without a second thought, I turned and flew beyond light speed across the universe, wondering where I was headed.

It didn’t take me all that long to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. As I soared through the void of space, it occurred to me that all I wanted was peace. I just wanted a place where I could kick my feet up and not worry, a place that I could call my own.

So I would make that place, and I would pursue my own peace with the same vigor and diligence as these cultivators who pursued their next advancement. I would still cultivate of course, but cultivation wouldn’t be the end goal, merely the means.

As I stood there, my body being carried by a sword piercing through both space and time, I thought. I thought about exactly what it was that I would need to pursue this peace. I thought about all the clans and sects in the multiverse. I thought about the factions that swayed them. I thought about the Divine Beasts swimming through galaxy clusters and the God-Imperiums in their Celestial Realms. They were the most powerful cultivators in all of reality, but even they fought for resources, nipping and taking from each other like too many piglets competing for their mother’s last teet.

The problem was that I’d eventually get dragged into the fight. That was the flaw of eternity, eternity brought down everything. If the chances of someone ever finding me in some remote corner of the multiverse were one in googolplex, well that was practically guaranteed to happen given enough time. No, if I wanted peace, I had to guarantee it.

So if I wanted to stay alive, the best course of action would be to have an unbreakable defense, something even the God-Imperiums would not test. I needed a retirement plan so solid that it could withstand the selfishness and cruelty of the cultivator's world.