Chapter 5

I started doubting my wet nurse's judgment the moment I first came to after a long sleep. And how could I not? I woke up on the floor, which was bad enough, surrounded by elderly people in white robes and strange, slightly elongated hats. Besides that, we were in some small temple, which didn't exactly lift my spirits. I could only hope the supposed good guys (white robes, come on!) wouldn't toss me on an altar in the name of whoever.

As it turned out, I was right to worry: nothing good was waiting for me.

The old baboons argued for a long time. Every so often they examined me, and sometimes they sent their energy inside me, trying to figure out what the hell was going on in there. Strangely enough, they found the "source of the problem" pretty fast. The venerable old masters didn't hold back. Some of them started cursing. One literally jumped away from me, like I was patient zero of some deadly plague. Somebody screeched something about a "creature" or a "demon." I sort of worked out the word, but only sort of—I would've needed to hear it, and especially the feeling behind it, a couple more times. In any case, the screeching wasn't what you'd call positive.

One old woman flat-out suggested they just kill me. The scariest part was that the "good guys" all took the idea very seriously. They were most likely already working on an excuse for their consciences. Then someone standing off to the side of this "council of sages" stepped in: none other than the very same teeny-tiny old man with the broom.

"We made a promise."

He was probably the only one who looked at me with pity instead of like I was one giant source of problems.

My brain still wasn't working very well, so I don't remember much of the arguing. One thing I know for sure: once again, my life was hanging by a thread. If not for the little old man's voice, only the baboons know what would have happened to me. In the end, they reached some sort of compromise and…

Somehow started suppressing my black heart!

I watched in horror as they ganged up and poured their power into me together, straight into my chest, crushing the heart, which had gone berserk at the sheer nerve of it. In my eyes, their smug mugs instantly sprouted red skin and horns. Needless to say, I didn't last long outside my body under that sort of abuse. I got slammed back in, and there I screamed my lungs out for real, while mentally cursing in every language I knew and wondering what on earth had possessed my wet nurse to hand me over to these sadists.

Once my supernatural energy generator had been smothered by their foreign energy—blue, as I perceived it—they finally calmed down. It took them at least a couple hours. At least now most of the baboons no longer wanted to kill me… immediately. I took the whole ordeal about as badly as humanly possible. It felt like something important had been ripped out of me. Someone else's power was running the show in my chest, wrapped like a cocoon around the energy source that had become my own.

And even that wasn't the end of it. The old bastards started arguing about something again, but I couldn't hear a word anymore. I felt sick, my head was spinning, and my body felt like it had lost a couple pints of blood. I was blacking out, and that is CERTAINLY not something that should happen to a baby! I swore on my damn collection of matchstick towers that if I ever got the chance, I'd… Eh.

To hell with them.

***

A bright moon lit up the entire sky, so huge it crowded out everything else. I kept thinking that no moon could be that big or that bright, but nobody listened—probably not even me. The sky itself had turned a dark red, shot through with strange flecks of blue that looked a bit like clouds. The blood underfoot had gone black and even thicker. All these changes were more than enough for me already, but they didn't stop at the scenery. They got to me, too.

For some reason, my clothes had changed. Before, I'd been wearing perfectly normal twenty-first-century clothes. Now I was showing off some black knockoff of a knockoff hanfu. Not that I minded. I actually liked the style of these vaguely Chinese locals with their even weirder names. It breathed, and it suited the atmosphere, putting me in a melancholy sort of mood, like I belonged to something new and unexplored. My appearance was changing, too. My fingers were stretching, turning… um, thin and long. My hair was changing color. It had been light before and was now getting darker, but in an odd way. Some strands went the other way and "bleached," so my head, already battered by everything, was now partly gray. Anyone looking would think my clumsy little hands had tried to dye it themselves. And my eyes, gray before, looked like someone had hit them with a can of spray paint: red, almost burgundy. That put me on edge, frankly. As far as I could tell, I was somehow taking on the adult look of my current little body, with a bit of "customization" courtesy of my subconscious acting up.

As you can probably guess, my mug was changing too, practically in real time. Barely noticeable, but relentless and merciless on my psyche. I never thought of myself as a delicate flower, but when the scenery inside you starts rearranging itself at random—scenery that would pass for some bloody purgatory—and you start rearranging right along with it…

Damn. That's starting to sound like a diagnosis, isn't it?

"You know," I complained, lost in thought, "so far I'm getting the impression that I'm a punching bag with a grenade inside. It feels like everyone here wants to screw me over, except for a couple of people who are going to die anyway. And I'm not even a year old!" My voice went up a little, and I grabbed my hair. I really needed to vent to someone. I didn't want to spend all my time outside my body, after all; I liked actually "feeling" things, thank you very much. "I've only ever seen this in romance novels for women. There's some 'dark prince' everyone bullies and hates, then he gets revenge on all of them, becomes the scariest guy around, and dies tragically at the end. Or," I stumbled a little and scratched my head, "like a total loser. The main problem is, I'm not planning to croak, but I'm certainly not against stomping on a few faces. I just hope reality doesn't smite me for it, because the trend is already worrying. What do you think I should do?"

"Ghaaa…" the guy offered, fairly profoundly by his standards.

I'll take that as a yes.

The armored warrior had stopped trying to attack me, and so had the other residents of this strange place. When I'd called the locals my old buddies, the only lie was the "old" part. All it took was a bath in blood (and I had a pretty good guess whose) and a little screaming together, and look how much we had in common. Their bodies were still in the blood, but they weren't making those agonized sounds anymore, which was probably more of a good sign than a bad one.

Sadly, it hadn't made them any smarter. I'd just tried to share my pressing problems with one of the tenants of this bloody purgatory and got zilch for my trouble. Perhaps it was because I was speaking a language the warrior didn't know, but expressing myself in the natives' language was still a bit of a stretch for me.

Fortunately, my little bout of soul-searching didn't last long. I already knew the way, so I strolled over to the heart. This time I got there much faster than on my last walk. No idea how that works. I'm just glad it does.

"Gorgeous." The venom dripping from my mouth could have killed that midboss. "Just gorgeous!"

The black heart was locked inside some sort of blue sphere. It wasn't trying to hurt me, but the way it just sat there was plenty. I could still feel my potential ticket to a better life (or a worse one), but I had no access to it, and that drove me up the wall and stirred up a quiet fury in me. Besides that, just having that blue thing there made me uncomfortable deep down. It certainly didn't belong. I had to get rid of it. My life depended on it.

Even knowing the evil dust hadn't given me this present out of the goodness of his heart didn't stop me. The black heart had long since become a part of me. Taking it away was like cutting off my hand. Sure, I'd helped make that happen myself, but what difference did it make now?

I clicked my tongue, settled down beside the sphere, and started thinking about what to do. It had no outside power source, and my body treated it as foreign, so the rejection should only get stronger. There had to be options. The main problem was that I wasn't even a year old. What could I do without being able to tap into my own power directly? I should probably learn the language and how to wipe my own butt first, and here I was, already making plans. Yep. Genius!

Which meant all I could do was wait patiently. They weren't going to kill me, apparently—something about a "promise"—and I seriously doubted they'd dump me in some little village, what with the heart and all. In their shoes, the obvious move was to keep the "dangerous object" close and steer it in the right direction.

Getting a little ahead of myself here: they did give me that chance, though not right away. And along with that "chance," I finally figured out the main feature of my power, the one that had eluded me for so long. Let's just say it's fairly sinister, and it changed how I see a few things.

But first things first.

Let's start with this: I turned eight…