Damian's prison was no longer made of polished quartz or sharp silver bars. Now it was made of soft flesh, fragile bones, and helplessness.
In the first few months, the frustration nearly drove him mad.
A military strategist who had butchered men twice his size. And now? Trying to lift an arm ended in spasms. His muscles would not obey. And his neck gave way under the weight of his own head.
It was a constant humiliation.
Every cry was a humiliation. A reminder that he had lost. The taste of blood and the blade piercing his abdomen still burned in his memory.
And yet, as the days passed and his blurred vision slowly came into focus, Damian realized he had returned to the exact place he had fought so hard to escape in his previous life: the squalor.
The ceiling above the crib was not made of the dark, noble wood he had earned through sweat and struggle. It was made of thin, uneven boards stained by leaks.
Through the narrow crack in the bedroom window, the sky was rarely blue. Most of the time, it was smeared in shades of violet and smoky blue.
What should have been a bright star in the sky was, in truth, a colossal and terrifying phenomenon: a black ring surrounded by distorted orange fire, like an infernal eye watching the planet. A black hole.
At night, silence was never complete; Damian could hear the distant, rhythmic grind of metal gears and industrial smokestacks spitting ash.
Despite the poverty around him, he was not abandoned.
The woman who had held him in his first moments of life was now his mother. Ella had blond hair and dark eyes that always seemed to carry an ancient weariness, but her touch was warm. When she rocked him and sang lullabies in a language Damian still could not decipher, the cold inside the house seemed to retreat.
The hardened heart of the general found a rare peace against her chest.
But peace was a fragile illusion, and Damian understood that whenever his father came to pick him up.
His face was marked by thin scars and deep shadows beneath the eyes. His shoulders were broad, suggesting that he had once been strong, but now his posture sagged as if he carried an invisible weight.
When Arthur leaned over and lifted him from the crib, the air around them changed.
Damian tried to hold his breath. It was not the ordinary smell of a laborer's sweat. What rose from his father's skin and breath was the metallic, acrid odor of old rust mixed with acid.
It was an invasive, sickening smell that prickled at the back of the throat.
Arthur smiled at the baby, but the smile was interrupted by a cough. The man's chest convulsed violently, and the spasm passed directly into Damian's tiny body.
Arthur's arms were trembling. Not the tremor of someone who was cold, but of a body collapsing from the inside out.
'He's broken,' Damian concluded, studying his father's yellowed eyes with an analytical mind. 'Whatever the war was, this man lost.'
That night, while listening to the rain on the roof, the entity's voice echoed in his mind:
"Consume and purify your blood...
everything taken from you will be returned."
Damian pressed his small, chubby fists against his chest.
He wanted only to forget the blades. He wanted only to live in peace, far from conspiracies, armies, and gods. But when he looked at the cheap crib and smelled the sickness clinging to his new father in the air, he understood the hard truth of his reincarnation.
The passage of time in his new world was exhausting. For a prisoner of his own flesh, however, time was the only currency that could be traded for freedom.
Little by little, the prison began to give way.
His first great victory was not with a sword, but over his own knees. At seven months, he finally mastered the art of crawling. At ten, ignoring the limits of infant balance, he used the edge of the worn sofa in the living room to pull himself upright. His legs trembled violently, but he remained standing—at least for a few seconds.
Then came his first fall. His muscles failed, and he crashed against the uneven wooden floor, striking his chin. The pain was sharp, stupid, and humiliating.
Ella dropped the pots in panic and ran to check the baby's face for blood. Her face had gone pale, but Arthur, reading in the corner, only laughed—and coughed.
"Leave the boy, Ella," Arthur said, walking over with his limping gait. He ruffled the boy's thick curls with one rough, warm hand. "He's tough. A warrior doesn't cry over the first stumble, right, boy?"
His mature mind found the fall ridiculous, but the way Ella held him against her chest, and the tired pride in Arthur's eyes, disarmed him completely. He felt something warm bloom inside his chest.
He liked those people. He liked them very much.
Meals often consisted of bitter root mash and thin soups. The food was bad and bland, but for someone who knew true hunger and life in filthy alleys intimately, it had value of its own.
He swallowed every spoonful in silence, never spitting it out or rejecting the meal.
Mastering the language was his longest campaign. Damian spent the first year listening carefully, cataloging phonemes, linking Arthur and Ella's facial expressions to the sounds they made.
By the time he turned one year old—a milestone celebrated with a tiny cake made from cheap flour and sweetened with weak syrup—he understood enough to notice when the adults were lying.
And it was in the gaps between those false words of comfort that he began to understand how fragile the safety of that house really was.
At night, when the face of the planet turned away from the cosmic anomaly and entered darkness, Arthur whispered stories.
"You don't need to be afraid of the darkness out there, Dalren," Arthur would murmur, his voice vibrating in his chest, his rust-laced breath brushing the boy's face.
Hearing that name still caused a faint friction. The past was dead, buried—probably light-years away. Beneath the thin blanket, he swallowed his ghosts and accepted his new self.
He's Dalren Vance now.
"When you grow up," his father continued, rocking him slowly, "they'll tell you about glory. They'll tell you about the Clotted Spires."
Arthur was interrupted by a cough. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand before continuing, his gaze lost on the factory smokestacks in the distance.
"Don't go near them when you're older, boy. Heroes and power... lies. That place isn't worth the price people pay."
Dalren only stared at him in silence, committing every word to memory.
The warning was simple, told like a story meant to frighten children, but the tone of Arthur's voice did not lie.
The years sped by. By the age of two, Dalren was already walking and speaking, though his high voice limited his authority.
He ran through the little house, watched the wear on Arthur's boots, noticed the calluses on Ella's fingers, and his military mind began drawing long-term plans to get them out of that life.
Visits from relatives were tests of patience. Dalren endured the pinching hands and loud voices with extreme resignation. To the family, he was only a strangely quiet baby. To him, it was a constant exercise in self-control.
Among those visits, Valerius was the most frequent. Arthur's younger brother stood out from the rest of the family. He did not smell like grease, soot, or cheap soap, but of a strong cologne trying to cover the odor of the city's machinery.
He wore well-cut synthetic leather coats and always entered the house with a broad smile, bringing some small comfort to Ella—a softer loaf of bread, a sweet syrup, or a cheap wooden toy.
Valerius liked to ruffle Dalren's curls and call him "little lord." Ella always thanked his generosity with tearful eyes. Arthur, on the other hand, only nodded.
'There's something wrong with this dynamic', Dalren concluded.
Confirmation came one dawn, while rain battered the roof so violently it muffled the distant sounds of the factories.
A hurried knock on the door woke the house. It was not the sound of a casual visit.
From the gap in the crib, Dalren watched. Arthur standing in the room. Valerius in a drenched coat.
His uncle's easy, friendly smile was gone.
"What are you doing here at this hour?" Arthur's voice came out low and rough, careful not to wake Ella in the next room.
"I came to see how you're doing," Valerius replied, pulling a small glass vial from his pocket and setting it on the table. The liquid inside was dark and thick. "Pure tonic. It'll ease your chest."
Arthur did not touch the glass. His eyes flicked from the vial to his brother.
"With what money, Valerius? The guilds raised the prices on everything last week. Even the dock merchants don't have this."
Valerius's tone changed. Dalren sharpened his attention. The compassionate tone had disappeared entirely, replaced by a cold, measured rhythm in his words.
"I have contacts. People who pay well for someone who knows how to clean the residue the industries reject."
"I already told you I'm not going down to the Towers anymore," Arthur cut in.
"No one needs to go down into the Towers, Arthur." Valerius stepped forward, closing the distance between them. "The black market is starving, brother. I have the buyers, and you're the only one left who knows how to purify human blood without killing the person in the process."
Silence swallowed the room, broken only by the painful rasp of Arthur's breathing. Valerius was not there to bring medicine or help the family. The vial on the table was bait. The good uncle was there to turn his own dying brother into the cook for a clandestine slaughterhouse.
'If I had my old body, I'd break his neck before he took another step,' Dalren thought, icy fury locking his small jaw.
The front door slammed. Soon after, Arthur's coughing overtook the house, sounding wetter and more torn than ever, as though Valerius's very presence had worsened the sickness in his lungs.
In the darkness of the room, listening to his father fight for every breath, Dalren's mind began to work. The gears that had once been dormant were now spinning at full force, processing the fragmented information he had just gathered.
He rested his head on the thin mattress, eyes fixed on the damp stains across the ceiling.
If the logic of war he knew from his old world applied to this new one, then the structure of that city was beginning to make a sick kind of sense.
The Clotted Spires. They were extraction points. That city did not produce steel or grain; it processed what came out of the Spires. The guilds, the nobles... if their monopoly was tightening hard enough to dry up the black market, then whatever existed inside those ruins was the true economic and military engine of the world.
And the collateral damage of that industry was obvious.
Dalren remembered visits from his older cousins. Their muscles had been dense as steel cables. There had been something wrong with them.
One time, when one of his cousins lifted him, Dalren felt the pressure of the boy's fingers against his ribs. It was brute, dense, abnormal strength for someone that age.
Arthur had probably been one of them once. The broad frame of his father's shoulders did not lie; he had once possessed that same unnatural vigor his nephews displayed.
The power of the Towers altered the body, gave it strength, but the price was what Dalren smelled every day. His father's illness was not a virus or a bacterium. It was the bill coming due.
The "residue," as Valerius had called it. The bloody filth of that place had embedded itself in Arthur's lungs and nervous system, eating him alive from the inside out.
His mind fixed on the image of the little glass vial Valerius had left on the table. The "pure" tonic.
His uncle had said buyers would pay fortunes for someone who knew how to clean the residue from human blood.
The air in the room seemed to freeze as the final pieces locked into place in his mind. If Valerius wanted to use humans as clandestine extraction mines, then blood was not merely a vital fluid in that world; it was fuel. It was a battery. It was power.
Arthur knew how to purify it without killing the host. He must have done it to himself countless times in the guts of the Towers just to make it back alive, dealing with his own contaminated blood so he would not go mad or explode in the process.
But how?
A chill ran through his veins. The entity's words struck his mind once more:
"Consume, and purify your blood..."
It was not a metaphor. The entity had been giving him the instruction manual, the basic and cruel law of that world.
If he wanted to save his new family and crush any blade that ever tried to pierce his abdomen again, he would need to consume what that world offered and find a way to purify the corruption before it devoured him.
And the only man in the world with the practical knowledge to teach him how to do that was, at that exact moment, in the next room, coughing his life out of his chest.