The Asura in White

The work began in the cold, damp cellar. Lin Xuan turned his mind inward, focusing on the ruins of Kaelen's body. The spiritual pathways needed to channel this world's power, Starfire, were like shattered glass inside his limbs. Using his immense soul-power like a needle and thread, he tried to stitch the broken pieces back together.

The moment he started, pain, white-hot and sharp, shot up his arm—a memory of a wound Kaelen had received long ago. His first attempts were failures. Every time he made progress, a jolt of remembered agony would make the body flinch, and his delicate work would break apart again. He was trying to mend a ghost, and the ghost was fighting back.

Exhausted after days of this, he paused. As he did, a different memory surfaced, warm and quiet. He saw Kaelen, much younger, sitting on a sun-drenched stone balcony. Beside him, a woman with kind eyes, Elara, peeled a piece of fruit. She placed a slice in Kaelen's hand, and he felt a simple, peaceful contentment he had never known.

The memory vanished, leaving him in the cold darkness once more. The warmth of that small moment made the pain of his task feel even sharper. With a new determination, he began again, this time bracing himself for the pain. After a week of agonizing effort, he finally repaired one single, tiny pathway. He pulled in the energy of the world, and a faint spark of Starfire, weak but real, came to life within him. A victory.

Now, he had to repair the pathways near his heart. This was where Kaelen's deepest wound resided. The moment he began, the memory of Elara's death flooded him, drowning him in a grief that wasn't his. He felt Kaelen's scream of despair as he watched her die to save him.

At the peak of his struggle, the memory twisted. The dying Elara's eyes focused, not on Kaelen, but on him. On the watcher inside the memory.

"You wanted power," a voice whispered in his mind, a voice that was hers and yet not. "Was it worth this?"

The question struck him like a physical blow. His focus shattered. In that moment of pure crisis, unable to think, he was forced to rely on the body's old instincts. The ghost of Kaelen took over, and with a familiar ease that was not Lin Xuan's own, the broken pathway snapped into place. The painful memory faded, leaving Lin Xuan shaken. He had succeeded, but only by letting the ghost in his mind take control.

Weeks passed in this grueling rhythm. Finally, he had repaired a single major pathway from his core to his hand. He was mentally and physically exhausted when the cellar door was kicked in. Three thugs stormed in, led by a large man who radiated a weak, messy Starfire.

"Looks like this rat hole is finally free," the leader sneered, seeing the frail man in the corner. "Get him out."

As one of the men lunged, Lin Xuan opened his eyes. He didn't move from his seated position. He simply lifted one hand and called upon the single thread of power he had fought so hard to forge.

At his fingertip, a tiny, silver star, no bigger than a pearl, pulsed with a calm, white light. He gently touched the thug's chest.

There was no explosion, no sound of violence. The man's body just… dissolved, turning into dust and faint motes of light that faded away.

The other two thugs stared at the empty space where their companion had been. The leader felt the pure, orderly nature of that silver light, and a terror he had never imagined possible froze him to the bone. They scrambled backward, turned, and fled screaming into the night.

Silence returned. Lin Xuan looked at his hand. For a second, he saw a different hand—stronger, calloused, a warrior's hand from a life he'd lived long ago. He blinked, and the image was gone. Kaelen's pale, scarred hand remained. The fusion was making his own identity unstable.

A cold thought, a remnant of Kaelen's long despair, echoed in his mind.

"It always begins with justice. Power used to protect the weak is how every tyrant starts his journey."

He sat in the quiet cellar, the cynical thought hanging in the air. He had acted only to defend himself, yet the ghost in his mind had already passed judgment. After a long moment, Lin Xuan himself spoke, his own voice a quiet, raw whisper.

"I didn't want to remember her."

He let the words hang in the stale air, an admission of the pain he'd been forced to endure. The memory of Elara was a wound. The ghost of Kaelen, a complication. They were unexpected variables in his experiment, nothing more.

He closed his eyes, shutting out the darkness of the cellar and the turmoil within. The test was complete. The work was not. He had a body to rebuild and a universe of power to master. The path forward was clear, even if the reason for walking it was not. And for now, that was enough.