The pain was immense. With every attempted breath, shattering pain filled Shao’s body, and blood spurted from his mouth. He looked down and saw that blood and purple bruising covered his chest, and a few ribs poked through his skin like the quills on a porcupine. He must have landed on his left arm, because it was far too shattered for him to move.

The fidelity on the edge of his vision began to blur, and a pulsing headache filled his head. Shao could feel that his body wanted to shut down. His body seemed to believe that this was the kind of injury you could sleep off, but Shao knew that if he lost consciousness, he would die without question. He resisted the call of oblivion, but every pulse of the terrible headache pulled him closer to the edge.

Survive.

The instinctual voice in the back of his head pushed him to stay awake. With his bruised but still mobile right arm, Shao grabbed a healing pill from his pocket. Slowly, he brought the healing pill supported by his trembling arm up to his mouth. The effort to move his arm was Herculean, and the darkness on the edge of his vision had almost consumed everything by the time the healing pill reached his lips. Just as Shao felt the healing pill travel past his tongue, the darkness overtook him.

An instant after this darkness consumed everything, the light returned, and the pain disappeared. Instantaneously, Shao could see the sky with crystal clarity, and pain in his chest was gone completely. He felt no pain. In fact, he felt nothing at all.

Shao rose to his feet, though he felt completely weightless. A grim thought loomed large in his mind, and this thought was confirmed a moment later. He looked down and saw his bleeding and broken body lying on the ground. The body’s hand was still held against its mouth where it remained without moving. Shao looked around to see that the scene around him was completely stationary. In the distance, Xiahou Ren was trapped mid-stride in his advance toward Wei Fenhua.

Only one figure in this snapshot of violence moved normally. Sitting upon a rock a few paces from Shao’s physical body was an individual that Shao had immense difficulty remembering. It was as if all of the individual’s features simply slipped out of his mind the moment he looked away. The only thing Shao recalled about the individual was that he was male, and he carried a long farming tool that was frequently used by rice farmers.

“Hello, War. It’s been a while.” A man’s voice emanated from where the individual’s head should be. The strange man sitting on the rock spoke with a strangely friendly tone of voice, as if he was greeting an old friend.

“Am I dead?” Shao asked fearfully, though his own voice did not pass his lips. The sounds that emanated when he spoke were featureless projections that sounded more like the wind passing through a tree’s boughs and branches than a human voice.

“No. It’s not your time yet. This is just a near Death experience, which means that I finally have a chance to talk to you. I have a lot to explain and not much time to do it.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Who are you?”

“It’s not important to your current situation, but you can call me Pluto, the God of Death.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Now, listen. I’m here to tell you about the nature of your birth. You may have wondered why you were born with such a high natural talent and powerful innate ability. The truth is that you are the reincarnation of the War God. One of us really should have told you this by now, but two other gods died in the same battle, and all three of you reincarnated at around the same time.”

It was all way too much for Shao to take in at once. He had heard stories of reincarnated Immortals, but he had never heard of a reincarnated god. No, it was impossible. The gods could not be killed. For three to die simultaneously, that would alter the very fabric of reality.

“Three gods died? How?”

“I don’t really have time to answer a bunch of questions right now,” Pluto said. “This time marble will collapse in about a minute. Jesus, you could have at least blacked out for longer than a second.”

“Sorry.”

Pluto walked over to Shao’s physical body and knelt down. The blurry figure did something over the body. A moment later, Shao saw that more than a dozen small bleeding wounds had been added to his damaged body.

“Hey!” Shao tried to shout, but the nature of his ephemeral voice transformed his interjection into an emotionless utterance.

“Don’t worry, War. The healing pill will handle the bleeding. I’m just opening up some of your ki pathways that atrophied with disuse. Consider this gift my apology for leaving you in the middle of nowhere.”

“Thank you?”

“Don’t mention it.” Something seemed to catch Pluto’s attention, and he took a few steps toward Xiahou Ren’s ongoing fight with Wei Fenhua. “Would you look at that? There are only nine important people in this world, and two ended up in such close proximity. I wonder if…”

There was a shimmer in the air surrounding both him and Pluto, and Shao suddenly found himself back inside his own body. Like an unavoidable rogue wave, pain crashed over Shao, and he was almost returned to unconsciousness. His whole body burned as the healing pill remolded Shao into an entirely different shape. Nearly half of his bones were forced back into their original place, and his destroyed organs were painfully reinflated with blood or air.

He tried to take a breath, but the thick blood remaining in his throat aspirated into his lungs. Shao rolled onto his front and coughed violently as he forced the excess blood out of his body. Unfortunately for him, the healing pill was imperfect, and much of his blood couldn’t be returned to his blood vessels or organs. After a few seconds of retching, Shao was able to take in a wheezing breath, and his lungs finally filled up with air.

Get up. There’s still a fight.

Painfully, Shao got to his feet. He felt battered and winded, but his body somehow moved with greater efficiency than it did before. Whatever Pluto did filled him with renewed strength, and he would use this strength to re-enter the fight.