Chapter 3 (Patreon)

“Akeno? Did it work?” The breathtakingly beautiful redhead looked up expectantly as her friend entered the clubroom.

“Yes.” Akeno smiled warmly, settled onto the sofa opposite her, and drew the freshly poured cup of tea toward herself.

Every student at Kuou Academy knew those two girls. They held the top two spots in the school’s unofficial beauty rankings: Rias Gremory, president of the Occult Research Club, and her best friend and vice president, Akeno Himejima. Both were gorgeous, mysterious, and the brightest stars in Kuou’s social universe.

“Any trouble?”

“None at all.” Akeno shook her head, her violet eyes warm as she looked at Rias. “Sitri-san congratulated House Gremory on gaining a new servant—Issei Hyoudou. She didn’t seem upset about it, either. House Sitri let us know they’re interested in Chiba Taro and asked us not to interfere.”

“Chiba?” Rias looked at her friend in surprise. “That gloomy guy from Issei’s class? But he’s an ordinary human! Strong, healthy, with plenty of life force, sure, but there’s nothing else to him. Sona would spend one of her pieces on a useless human? I don’t buy it!”

The redhead leaned back against the sofa cushions and took a thoughtful sip of tea. Sona Sitri was many things, but a fool wasn’t one of them. Rias’s childhood friend was brilliant. Her sharp mind was one reason Rias respected her so deeply; the others were her honesty, her serious nature, and her firm convictions.

Their rivalry over Evil Pieces had cooled their friendship a little, but there was no bad blood between them. A few schemes, a bit of competition, occasional tension, even hurt feelings—none of it was serious. That was just life among high-class devils. Compared with the games the adults played, theirs stayed well within the bounds of friendship and respect.

“Maybe there’s something we don’t know?” Akeno suggested. She agreed with Rias: Evil Pieces were far too valuable to waste on a human who was strong but otherwise unremarkable.

“Almost certainly.” The club president tossed her thick red hair. “It’s too late to play this differently now, but… I’m curious. Aren’t you? What do we actually know about him? Plenty of life force—that’s good. Straight-A student, top of his class—not bad. The teachers love him, but he hasn’t joined any clubs. Quiet, unsociable, serious, responsible. Keeps to himself, makes no effort to get close to anyone. No friends at school. Akeno?”

“You know more about him than I do,” Akeno said with a snort. “But that personality reminds me of someone. How about you?”

“Of course it does. He’s Sona turned up to eleven.” Rias smiled back. “Maybe she just wants to recruit him for the student council and doesn’t want us making a play for him? He’s not in any clubs, so he has time for council work. Serious, calm, responsible—Sona values all of that.”

“That sounds plausible,” Akeno said with a nod. “If she wants a capable, hardworking assistant for the future—someone to handle the books, for example—then spending a Pawn on him would be worth it. Besides, he knows martial arts, so he wouldn’t be complete dead weight.”

“I agree. Raw power matters less in a role like that. But there could be another angle. Maybe it has something to do with his life outside the academy? Should we ask Koneko to find out more about him?”

“Sitri-san might take that the wrong way,” Akeno said, shaking her head.

“We’d only be looking into him!” Rias protested. “Nobody’s going to try to recruit Chiba! The Gremorys keep their word! We’d just… satisfy our curiosity!”

We are what we eat. To most people, that just means our bodies are made of things we’ve eaten. But think about it for a moment, and the saying goes deeper.

We’re ravenous monsters. We feed on everything and build ourselves out of it all. The sounds our ears devour. The images our eyes drink in. The sensations our skin absorbs. And, of course, food, water, and air. Those too.

All of it together makes us who we are. Food builds the body; the information we take in shapes the personality.

All of that matters to an ordinary mortal. To a practitioner, it matters even more. Food is crucial in the early stages of cultivation. After all, we are what we eat, and a cultivator trying to perfect himself needs to be made of “clean” ingredients.

Our bodies shouldn’t have to waste energy purging junk, so we don’t stuff ourselves with crap in the first place. Diet matters like hell at the start of the path, and it stays important for a long time. It saves the body’s resources, freeing up another percent or two of its potential for something useful even at fairly advanced stages of cultivation.

Only when a practitioner breaks through to levels approaching those of mythical beings can they stop caring what they shovel into the body’s furnace. By then, the physical side of things takes a back seat.

But there’s a spiritual side, too. That intangible something fed by everything our senses consume. And today, I’ve seen the light. I’m seeing it right now, sitting on the roof where I always eat lunch and staring at the very healthy bento I made for myself.

I’m an experienced practitioner, and I knew it was my own fault I hadn’t broken through. But knowing something and truly understanding it are two different things. I’d… grown set in my ways. Living the same life hundreds of times, give or take a few details, had left my very sense of self stuck in a rut. My own version of Groundhog Day: get my memories back; start cultivating; find a suitable sect; work my way up through it; become the fattest toad in the sect, then the city, the province, the country… and hit a wall. I’d gotten used to it. My overall progress had all but stopped. With each rebirth, if I advanced at all, it was by a few laughable millimeters compared with the hundreds of thousands of kilometers I’d already covered.

It went something like this: you tear down a straight, familiar highway in a sports car, race through every mile you know, and then smash the car flat against a cliff that came out of God knows where. Again and again, with the stubbornness of… the stubbornness of an ancient practitioner. Yeah. The stubbornness of an old man who’d boxed himself in with rules and limits. With DISCIPLINE.

Cultivation, after all, is about disciplining both body and mind. I’d just forgotten that you can have too much of a good thing. And that lucky bastard I’d been thinking about earlier was one big fat hint.

He went off into the unknown, picking raspberries in the thickets. I stuck to the well-worn path, where every bush along the way had already been picked clean. And the kid was mortal. Dead meant dead for him—unlike me!

So who’s the idiot now? The guy who risked everything on his one and only chance and won, or me? Me, betting one measly chip at a time and forever breaking even—when I’ve got a fucking save-and-load mechanic?! Compared to him, I’m a moron!

Instead of trying new things, thinking them through, and hunting for scraps of the Great Meaning, I mapped out the “optimal route,” ran it again and again, and got roughly the same result every time. I stopped feeding my spiritual body!!! I starved it!!! Old fool…

And no, I’m not about to go looking for trouble just for the hell of it! It isn’t about risking my life—plenty of Ancient Practitioners reached great heights without ever fighting a Great Battle. What I need is something new, and I’ve had precious little of that. Something genuinely new! New perspectives, new ideas, new experiences, new feelings!

And this world is exactly what I need. Vast stores of information, a different way of life, new ways to grow. Once again, I’m convinced I hit the jackpot with this rebirth.

“And things are about to get even more interesting, aren’t they?” I asked a piece of meat from my bento. Before it could answer, it went straight into my maw.

The array for the Nine Eyes of the Sage technique was almost ready. I’d built and anchored its most basic part in my head before I even took the advancement pill. Now that I could manipulate qi with greater precision and my dantian had grown more powerful, I’d finished the work. Soon the world would take on new colors, and all those limitations would be a thing of the past.

The Nine Eyes of the Sage is an immensely powerful, fiendishly complex technique built around a monstrous array. It’s demanding as hell. That’s precisely why I’ve been cultivating using only the energy my dantian produces. The martial art I use for that is called “The Might of the Man Who Reached the Stars.”

Grandiose name aside… Hm. Then again, in cultivation worlds, you can’t judge a technique or a cultivation path by its name. A strike that’s only good for squashing a mosquito could be called “The Flaming Dragon of Destruction Swooping Down from the Seventh Heaven.”

Yeah, we cultivators have POMP down to a science! I wouldn’t be surprised if Warhammer’s God-Emperor was actually a Great Practitioner rather than a shaman… Hm. Right, I’m getting sidetracked!

Anyway, the Might of Man is a cultivation path that draws solely on the cultivator’s own qi. The only alchemy it allows is the kind that helps produce more of that qi or works on the body itself. Compared with most other paths, it’s fairly weak. Follow one of those, and you can burn cities or call down torrents of lightning long before reaching the highest stages.

But it has one enormous advantage: the Nine Eyes of the Sage. It’s the best technique I know, letting a cultivator see much, much more. It scales automatically with your cultivation level, only has to be built once, and can be switched on or off at will.

Depending on how far they’ve advanced, a practitioner who activates the Nine Eyes might gain nothing more than vision sharper than an eagle’s—or begin to perceive the world in terms of energy.

As the name suggests, there are nine… hm. Nine modes: keen sight; night vision; qi sight; energy sight, including heat and electricity; unveiling, which lets you see through disguises and illusions; a demon’s gaze; a god’s gaze… And that’s it. I don’t know the rest. There are two more modes, but the treatise where I found the array said nothing about them. In my past lives, my cultivation always stalled just as the fifth mode became available.

But there’s one catch, and it often puts the technique out of reach of ordinary practitioners. A cultivator’s dantian mustn’t be attuned to any foreign qi. Only their own human qi will do. Otherwise, when you build the array—which, mind you, goes inside your skull… your brain dies.

Maybe some other kinds of energy wouldn’t have that effect. But the practitioner who invented the technique understandably chose not to experiment on himself, and he never assembled a focus group of fellow cultivators. So most practitioners who could build the Nine Eyes of the Sage array choose not to. Those determined to use it spend a very long time cultivating on nothing but their own inner reserves.

In my case, though, those drawbacks aren’t nearly as serious. Thanks to the advancement pill, I finished the array and activated the technique two days after my “illness.” The Nine Eyes are still coming fully online, linking up with the right parts of my brain. I figure I’ll have access to three modes by this evening, and I’ll no longer need to keep my dantian from bonding with other kinds of qi.

“Just in time,” I whispered, setting aside the empty bento box and settling into a meditation posture. There was still plenty of time before lunch break ended, so I could drive qi through my meridians and do some thinking.

Something weird was going on at Kuou. There was no other way to put it. Ever since I’d run into the student council president and her vice president, every member of the council had been looking at me… strangely.

Before, I’d only ever caught the odd glance, fleeting and almost indifferent. Now there was curiosity in their eyes. Interest. Expectation. I sensed no ill intent, but somehow I’d caught their attention. What had I done to earn it?

As far as I could tell, I hadn’t done anything extraordinary. No crazy stunts, nothing to make me stand out. That left two possibilities.

The first was my fake illness. But according to the paperwork, it was real. Besides, why would the student council give a damn? Students got sick. It happened.

The second was my breakthrough. My dantian had reached a whole new level, and I’d gone from an almost ordinary person—albeit an exceptionally healthy and gifted one—to something more than mortal. To other practitioners, I must have stood out among ordinary people like a floodlight among candles.

And I couldn’t hide it yet!!! My body and meridians were still rebuilding themselves. Right now, I couldn’t suppress my presence for long without damaging my progress. I could end up crippled, and fixing the damage would take years.

It didn’t help that my passive senses as a cultivator were only just coming online. I could sense things up close, but a meter or two was my limit. It would take another three or four weeks for everything to settle down, and somehow, someone had already noticed me.

That put me on edge.

Then there was the weirdness brewing right in my own class. Its name was Issei Hyoudou.

Yesterday, I’d caught a glimpse of him with a new girlfriend. With my ridiculously sharp hearing, I’d even heard him bragging about it to the other two members of the Perverted Trio. I was happy for the guy. At last he had a shot at fondling the boobs he’d been dreaming about. The girl was gorgeous, too. Had to be a pervert herself to date him, but gorgeous all the same.

And today…

Nobody remembered a girl named Yuuma Amano. Nobody except Issei and me. That went beyond unnerving. It was a little frightening.

Mind manipulation was nasty shit. Practitioners who dabbled in it tended to get their asses kicked often, hard, and without anyone bothering to be gentle.

Which left me with a few questions. Had they left my mind alone because they assumed I hadn’t seen or heard anything? I’d been some distance away; only my cultivation level had let me notice her at all. And why did Issei still remember her?

Besides, Issei himself felt different now. I nearly killed him when he walked past me. For a moment, I took him for a demonic practitioner in disguise. Then I “listened” more closely to the flavor of his qi and relaxed.

There was a hint of something dark about him, but none of the foulness of demonic qi. You couldn’t mistake that stuff for anything else. Stale vomit, pus, and a rotting corpse mixed together—that was about the closest I could come to describing the stench my senses picked up from demonic practitioners.

But Issei had definitely gotten stronger. I even had the feeling that someone who might give me a real fight one day had just walked past.

Interesting. Very interesting. Interesting enough that I decided to blow off my plans for the day and follow him after school. I wanted to know what the hell was going on—and what had made him stronger. No cultivator would pass up a free power-up.

So, Issei Hyoudou, today you’re getting yourself a bona fide stalker. Sorry, though. It won’t be the cute girl you were loudly fantasizing about with your friends a couple of weeks ago.

What goes through your head when you’re one step from death? Issei Hyoudou could tell you plenty.

He absolutely did not want to die a second time, especially at the hands of some creepy guy. At least his last dream had a little ecchi in it. This one… Well, dream or not, he didn’t want to die again.

Too bad he was going to.

He ran from the frightening man with black wings, but he could feel him closing in…

A string of memories flashed before his eyes. A girl from another school. Yuuma. Beautiful, charming Yuuma, who had asked him out. Their date had been a brief stretch of happiness Issei could hardly believe was real.

She was so cute, so beautiful, so much fun that Hyoudou barely gave his powers of perversion a thought. He simply enjoyed being with her. To his surprise—and delight—he realized he was falling in love with this wonderful girl. She was like a real angel!

Then evening came… and the two of them spent it together in this very park.

And the beautiful dream became a nightmare. Sweet Yuuma changed before his eyes. She looked older, and her unfamiliar school uniform gave way to some outrageously revealing outfit, flashing a spectacular pair of boobs in the process…

Then she killed him. Slaughtered him like a pig.

It hurt like hell, but Hyoudou couldn’t tell which was worse: the wound through his chest or his heart shattering into a thousand pieces. One date. A few hours together. And he’d already fallen madly in love with her…

He’d died in that dream. Then he’d woken up in his own bed, alive and unhurt. Only then had Hyoudou realized it must have been a dream. His friends didn’t remember his Yuuma. Nobody remembered anything. So he must have dreamed it.

But that didn’t put the pieces of his heart back together. The dream had felt so real that Issei was still hurting over what had happened.

But there was something else strange, besides the ridiculously detailed dream in which Issei Hyoudou had fallen in love, been betrayed, and come away with a case of phantom heartache.

First there was Rias-senpai, the most beautiful girl in school. She walked right past Issei, looked at him, and smiled. The way she looked at him, the way she smiled, made his heart skip a beat! That gaze, that smile, that cascade of hair the color of blood…

A memory flashed through his mind. After Yuuma had killed him in that dream, he’d stared at his bloodied hands and thought of Rias. Of her hair, redder than spilled blood, brighter and more tempting than ripe strawberries…

And then Chiba Taro happened to Issei.

All he’d done was walk past his classmate when a wave of bloodlust hit him so hard he would have leapt away—if sheer terror hadn’t forced his legs to keep moving. He couldn’t even freeze. It lasted only a second, but Hyoudou spent the next ten minutes jumping at every little noise.

Chiba hadn’t so much as batted an eye. He’d been his usual unreadable self.

I must have imagined it, Issei decided. Then he started worrying about his sanity. Inexplicable dreams, menacing hallucinations…

After school, Issei went with his friends to check out the latest… uh… additions to their collection of pervy “treasures.” And that’s when the weirdness really started.

The guys turned off the lights so they could see the TV better. Issei noticed the lights go out, but the room didn’t get dark!!! He could still make out everything, even with the curtains drawn and the TV as the only source of light.

Issei left his friends and wandered through the city as dusk fell. To his surprise, he found he could see easily in the dark and hear things from far away.

Before he knew it, Hyoudou had reached the very park where Yuuma had killed him in his dream.

But had it really been a dream?

It was right here, by the small fountain in the middle of the park, that he’d met the creepy man in a cloak with black wings.

First, Hyoudou had felt something strange. The world had turned… odd. For a second, everything seemed to waver in a haze. Then the man appeared, practically radiating menace. It wasn’t like the wave of bloodlust he’d felt from Chiba at school, but it was still terrifying.

Issei tried to run. The black-winged man chased him, intent on killing him… and Issei knew he couldn’t get away.

He really didn’t want to die. Especially at the hands of some creepy guy.

A blur shot out from somewhere near the bushes, cutting his memories short. A gust of wind. A thud and a clang behind him.

“Who the hell are you?!” Hyoudou heard the creepy winged man shout.

Issei turned around and, to his surprise, found a new player on the scene: his classmate, Chiba Taro. Yep, the same guy who’d scared the hell out of him at school!

The gloomy, boring, quiet kid he and his friends had written off as a hopeless loser who was scared of girls looked different now. Issei couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but Chiba didn’t seem like himself at all.

“Trash,” Chiba said, spitting contemptuously as he eyed the creepy man and his glowing weapon. Was it a spear or a sword? Issei couldn’t tell.

His classmate’s voice sounded different, too. Deep, heavy, and so full of arrogance it was practically overflowing.

“Trash that attacks weak children is unworthy of hearing the Greatness of My Name. Begone, you walking disappointment to your father.”

“What?” What little Issei could see of the winged man’s face beneath his hat twisted. “Kid. You’re not one of those creatures. Not like him.” He jerked his chin contemptuously toward Issei, who was so startled he forgot all about running away. “I don’t know who you are or how you got past the barrier, but I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that if you leave right now!”

At that, Chiba… burst out laughing.

Issei caught himself thinking he’d heard that laugh hundreds of times in anime. Scornful, arrogant, meant to humiliate whoever it was aimed at. The laugh of a textbook villain.

“Black Rooster-san, I gave you a chance,” Issei’s classmate drawled mockingly once he’d finished laughing. The winged man’s cheek twitched as Chiba settled into some kind of fighting stance. “Now behold the Might of the Man Who Reached the Stars, trash. Get over here, you motherfucking bastard…”

Then things got unbelievable. With that… insulting excuse for a battle cry, Chiba blurred through the air, closing the distance to the man Issei feared so much in a single second. He reached him and struck.

Only Hyoudou’s strange new… abilities let him see the blow land. Then Chiba moved again, appearing behind the man his punch had sent flying. As the winged man hurtled toward him, Chiba met him with another simple punch to the back of the head. The blow stopped him in midair and spun him a full hundred and eighty degrees.

And that wasn’t the end…

A flurry of kicks, each a blur of motion, lifted the man farther off the ground. He hung there as if trapped in an antigravity field of pain.

And then…

Issei watched the impossible spectacle in terrified awe. His classmate was pummeling the body suspended in midair. The punches came so fast that Chiba seemed to have dozens of arms, each delivering blow after blow.

As if that weren’t enough, a phantom double seemed to sprout from Chiba’s lower back. It punched the winged man too, doubling the number of phantom fists.

His classmate had lost himself in the fight, and his unbroken roar echoed across the park…

“ORA-ORA-ORA-ORA-ORA…” Chiba bellowed without pause, pounding the creepy man into… a winged cutlet.

This looks more like a beating than a fight, Issei thought, unable to tear his eyes from the surreal spectacle. A microscopic speck of pity for the man being pummeled stirred in him. Then he remembered how frightened he’d been and promptly strangled it.

Hyoudou was so absorbed in the madness before him that even a reddish glow appearing off to one side failed to draw his attention away.

(Issei Hyoudou, the protagonist of the original story.)