"So that's it. Shree Yan, your life is not darker than mine." Shree Yan sighed, the sound low and tired, more breath than voice. "But your story will be sad for others. But not for me."
Outside, the afternoon light filtered weakly through thin paper screens, casting pale rectangles across the wooden floor of his room. Dust drifted lazily through the beams, undisturbed, as though even the air itself moved slower here than it had on the battlefield of his previous life.
The clan's name is the Magar clan.
But the true name is the Rana Magar clan. But for easier understanding, they chose it — a small mercy for outsiders who struggled with the older tongue, though Shree Yan suspected the simplification had cost the name something in the process, some weight it once carried.
Suddenly Shree Yan's stomach slowly got pain, a dull ache spreading from somewhere deep beneath his ribs, tightening with each breath. The reason is that, before, Shree Yan ate Rana. (राना) in Nepal simply means (a king). But in the novel, Rana is a worm.
This is not an ordinary worm, it's a magical creature — one that even now writhed faintly somewhere inside him, a presence he could feel the way one feels a held breath, pressing quietly against the inside of his chest.
A king has so much knowledge. So it means (king worm), who can detect and transfer details into the human brain.
In the Rana world, there are ten rare magical creatures, weapons or artifacts, and many other creatures, artifacts, and weapons — most lost to time, buried beneath centuries of war and ambition, their names surviving only in fragments of old scrolls and older memories.
Shree Yan sits on the bed, the wooden frame creaking softly beneath his weight, sheets pooling around his legs. He starts the concert in the inner body, closing his eyes, letting his breathing slow to something deliberate and measured.
He started gathering his willpower and trying to stabilize the rana, sweat beading faintly along his hairline despite the cool air drifting through the cracked window. The rana was instantly moving, twisting sharply inside him like something alive and resistant, refusing at first to settle.
After one hour, he finally succeeded in stabilizing the rana, exhaling slowly as the pain in his stomach faded to a dull, distant throb. His shoulders relaxed for the first time since he'd sat down.
Knock! Knock!
Someone started knocking on the door of Shree Yan's room, the sound sharp against the quiet. Shree Yan said, "Coming," his voice steady again, betraying none of the effort of the last hour. A girl stepped into Shree Yan's room, her footsteps light against the floorboards. She looked at Shree Yan with a joyful smile, one that reached her eyes just enough to seem convincing.
She walked forward to Shree Yan, silk sleeves brushing softly against her sides. She sits on the bed, the mattress shifting slightly under the added weight. She is the same age as Shree Yan. In her hands there is a wooden circle bucket, water sloshing gently near the rim with each small movement, in the bucket where there was water, still warm from wherever she'd drawn it.
She brought it because he wanted to wash his face — or so she claimed, her smile never wavering, practiced and warm as spring sunlight.
In the previous life of Shree Yan, she was trying to seduce Shree Yan. After his mother died, but she wasn't successful. Also in this life, she will not be successful flirting with Shree Yan — a fact she did not yet know, though something in the stillness of his gaze might have warned a more careful observer.
She was a spy of Niang Ming. She has no feelings for Shree Yan. She just wants to use him as a tool for raising her and her family. This was the day where Shree Yan locked himself in the room for three years, and the day he was reincarnated, only one month had passed — a coincidence that was, in truth, no coincidence at all.
Crack!
The sound was small, almost delicate, like a dry branch snapping underfoot in winter. Shree Yan cracks her neck and she is dead before the smile had even fully left her lips, her body slumping sideways against the sheets, the bucket tipping and spilling a thin stream of water across the wooden floor. Shree Yan doesn't show his emotions. His gaze was so cold and he was calm, watching the water spread slowly outward, catching the last of the afternoon light.
There's no value of servants, nothing more than trash. She was trying to kill him, on top of that, who is the patriarch of the future — a fact that made her fate, in his eyes, entirely deserved, and entirely unremarkable.
Shree Yan's lips curled and smiled lightly, rising from the bed and stepping carefully around the spreading water. "Niang Ming, if you want to play a battle with me, remember that. I won't be a challenger... I would be a master, and you will be a challenger!" This was a 700-year-old demon pulling words! He is a master; Niang Ming is a child in front of Shree Yan.
Shree Yan stepped onto the window ledge and looked down, the cool stone beneath his bare feet a welcome contrast to the warm, still air of the room behind him. Below him lay a garden filled with beautiful flowers — chrysanthemums and pale peonies swaying gently in the wind, their petals catching brief flashes of gold as clouds shifted overhead. Yet, in one quiet corner of that beauty, half-hidden beneath the roots of an old plum tree, there was a small, dark hole in the ground.
A rat crawled out, whiskers twitching, fur matted along one side as though it had recently escaped some other danger.
Moments later, a snake slithered out from the same hole, scales dark and glistening faintly in the afternoon light, its cold eyes locked onto its prey with an intensity that seemed almost patient. The rat ran.
It ran desperately, its tiny body trembling, small claws scrabbling frantically against packed dirt, pushing itself beyond its limits. For two or three minutes, it struggled with everything it had, darting between the roots of flowering shrubs, refusing to give up even as its breath came in short, panicked bursts.
But after twenty-seven steps… its body suddenly stopped, legs giving out beneath it as though some invisible weight had finally settled fully onto its small frame.
Silence.
Even the wind, for a moment, seemed to still.
In the end, the snake caught up and swallowed it whole, the motion swift and utterly without ceremony. Its destiny had ended there, a small ripple of disturbed grass the only remaining evidence that anything had happened at all. Shree Yan watched quietly from the window ledge, his expression unreadable, one hand resting lightly against the wooden frame.
"In this world… weakness is a sin," he murmured, voice barely louder than the breeze moving through the garden below. "The weak do not choose their fate — they become part of someone else's."
He turned away from the window, a faint shadow crossing his eyes, the light catching briefly on the sharp line of his jaw before he stepped back down into the room, careful again to avoid the water still pooling near the bed.
That disappointment was not only for the rat… but for all living beings. "If life is nothing but suffering for the powerless…" he thought, pausing beside the body now cooling on his sheets, "then what is the meaning of living like this?"
He paused, standing very still in the quiet room, the only sound the faint drip of water reaching the edge of the floorboard and falling, drop by drop, onto the stone beneath.
Then his gaze hardened, something settling behind his eyes that had not been there a moment before. "No… dying is not the answer. If this world devours the weak… then I will become someone it cannot devour."
Outside, the wind picked up once more, carrying the scent of crushed grass and distant rain, and somewhere beyond the garden wall, a bird called out once into the stillness before falling silent again.