Chapter 2: The Message

I slept in a puddle of tears that night. The next morning I didn’t move, meaning my mother had to force feed me. I was in a state of depression and shock, I just couldn’t believe it. Just a few months ago my life was full of colour and was happy, but slowly I felt the world changing colour. The blue sky turned grey as my heart turned black. Luckily my mother was still here, as when I looked at her some of the colour returned to the world.

Days passed and life had seemingly returned to what it was before we had received the letter. Though my mother and I tried to display happiness in order to seem strong to the other, we both knew that we were deeply filled with sorrow.

That night I went to bed, it was like any other night. But just as I closed my eyes I heard a sound. ‘What was that sound?’ I thought. Then the sound happened again and I suddenly recognised the sound. It was a battle horn, what the armies would use in order to intimidate the enemy before attacking. I started hearing shrieks as my bedroom door suddenly opened.

Soldiers dragged me out of my room as I screamed. I saw the village on fire around me and was shocked. The buildings I knew, the people who I knew were charred and laid on the ground showing no signs of movement. I was put in a line of children and I saw my mother in a line of adults.

The commander from the soldiers then said his orders “Kill the adults, and take the kids as slaves.”

What shocked me was not what he said, but how he said it. There was no emotion in his voice, as if he did this every day. What kind of sick man could do that without blinking an eye? I looked up at my mother, and saw her lifeless eyes. I knew, I saw, that she was already dead. Not physically, but she had already given up on life. Unknowingly tears started to scream down my face. I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t speak.

The moment the axe sliced through her neck I felt nothing anymore. Watching her head roll on the floor I could do nothing, say nothing, and feel nothing. My eyes merely shut as I fainted. A familiar feeling took control of my soul. My heart turned black and I felt my face smiling.

‘Aah, this feeling. How lovely, that sensation when you know you should be furious and feel something, but you just don’t feel anything at all. All my anger is gone.’ I slowly opened my eyes and saw the world. It was really strange. The world seemed so colourless, I could see the colours, but it was as if the emotion behind the colours was not there. It was like an empty shell. I heard sounds around me, but I did not process them in my head. They were like mumbles. The smile on my face grew even wider on my face as I realised that I had completely snapped.

I started to laugh loudly, so loudly. All the other children stared at me in horror as I laughed away. ‘HAHAHAHA. This is truly too funny. I finally understand. The gods are playing a game with me. They think they can get away with torturing me. It seems that I will have to give the gods a bit of their own medicine.’ I thought. I would change my dream to destroying the gods. This was no longer a dream of a child, but instead the dream of a man who had lived two lives in torture. I would no longer follow the path the gods have set for me. I REFUSE to follow what other people taught me.

I continued to laugh until the soldiers started to beat me. And then I only stopped laughing in order to stop myself from choking on my own blood. The soldiers spat on me, they pissed on me. I was beat constantly, but I would never stop laughing. My laughter carried through the entire camp we were placed at. Even while enduring the ridiculous labour they put us through. My laughter would only stop in the night.

This was not because I slept, but instead because I was cultivating. I absorbed the qi around me. The battle qi and mana qi I 

absorbed was very different from what other people would absorb however. During my torturous experiences it seemed that I had formed a mutation. I would now absorb only death battle qi and death mana qi. This meant that when I cultivated I would quite literally suck the life out from the world around me. Not many days passed until people started realising that the plants around the camp started to wither. The food got rotten much quicker, and there was suddenly a food shortage.

This was not enough for me though. I needed more. I started to directly absorb the life force of the people around me. I felt no need to harm the children, so I only absorbed the life force from the soldiers. They started to visibly be more tired and they started to suffer from headaches.

Then that night happened. I had already risen to a level 2 mage, this was because the qi needed to reach that level was not much, and your level would rise rapidly if you knew magic techniques and understood the basic premise of magic. In magic when one reached level 3 then they would really start as a mage, similarly to reaching level 3 as a warrior.

I sat meditating in my tent with several other children. I got a lot of room since they were terrified of me. I felt a strange feeling take over my body, it seemed that my mana qi and battle qi was merging. I was slightly confused until I remembered what I read in a book once:

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‘If one experiences a growth in level simultaneously as a mage and as a warrior then the qi’s will merge into battlemana qi. This has only occurred several times in history, but from what is known is that the very realms of mage and warrior would merge into one. If one were to experience this change then one would become much stronger than those of the same level and even most of the level above. Anyone who has experienced this has gone on to become a heaven-defying genius’

I didn’t react to this change in my body, but I realised that this change would make it easier to become strong enough to kill the gods. I felt as my qi underwent a change and felt my body naturally refining itself to be stronger. The deathly battlemana qi rushed through my meridians as it formed my body differently. My skin became deathly white and my eyes became red. My hair turned white and I generally became flawless in every sense. I looked like a demon.

My eyelids opened up, revealing my glowing red eyes. I smiled, not because I was now a third level battlemage, but because I now had the power to kill all the bastard soldiers that dared take my mother’s life.

I thought of a plan. Most of the warriors at the camp were at the third and fourth level, and the commander was at the fifth level. 

This meant that if I wanted to kill every soldier and the commander I would need to be in peak condition in order to kill the commander, otherwise I wouldn’t stand a chance.

Luckily my awakening into a battlemage had sucked even more life force out of the soldiers. This meant that it would be easy to sneak around them. I decided that I would first kill the commander, and then I would kill the rest after I had destroyed their morale.

The next evening I decided to put my plan into place. I snuck into one of the soldier’s tents and stole a sword. I used battle qi on the sword to reinforce it and make it stronger. My body was much stronger now that I had cultivated to the third level of the battlemage realm. And the sword which should be impossible for a six year old to lift actually felt a little light in my hands. I only used one hand to hold the sword, because I wanted to leave my other hand open to use magic. I only knew one strong offensive technique when it came to magic, and that was called the Martial Grip. The Martial Grip would allow one to use an illusionary hand to hold a target, and to be able to throw them around like a ragdoll. It was quite a powerful technique so I decided that using it would at least make it difficult for the commander to move as well as he would want.

I knew that the commander would be in his tent right now, so I simply walked inside. The moment the commander saw me he stood up, he knew why I was here. There would be no words exchanged, just a pure contest of strength. He launched towards me, but I caught him off guard using the Martial Grip, I realised that my Martial Grip had become a Deathly Martial Grip, and I could actually absorb life force directly from the commander like this. After a couple of seconds the commander managed to escape the grip, but he had clearly had a lot of life sucked out of him. Just through that one move I had probably lowered his longevity by 10 years.

He launched towards me with his sword. I was certainly surprised by his agility even after I had absorbed so much of his life. Our swords clashed, and I had to use both hands on my sword to try and resist the commander’s strength, but he sliced directly through my sword. I was shocked for a moment, but then started to laugh. This was great. Not only could I kill this bastard, but I could even take his sword, which I projected to be a lower level artefact.

Seeing my killing intent only growing the commander grew increasingly nervous. He had expended a lot of energy on that last attack and he probably only had one attack left in him, whereas I still had tons of energy left in me. Looking at my broken sword I frowned and looked around for a weapon. I quickly found a spear, but the moment I saw the commander leaping towards me. I happened to lift the spear up just in time and it managed to stab him through the stomach. It wasn’t able to kill him fully, but he was unable to fight.

Seeing this I laughed and dragged him outside. In front of all the faces of the shocked soldiers I started to take out the small intestine of the commander. Then I stretched it out and tied it around a tree in a noose-like fashion. I grabbed the commander and put his head in the noose made from his intestine. I knew that the small intestine would hold, because it was the small intestine of a fifth level warrior. Of course it would be able to hold the weight of an 80 kilo man.

I put the commander’s head through the noose and then dropped his body, causing him to die not of the spear wounds, but because of a noose made from his small intestine. Watching his face turn blue, and seeing the life slowly exit his body was rather beautiful. This was a message to the gods.

I turned to the terrified soldiers and asked as simple question “Who’s next?”