Dying, Lark decided, was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him.

  Not the most painful, though it was definitely up there. Not the most unexpected, because honestly, anyone who had lived as long as he had and still sat at the bottom of the cultivation world probably should have seen it coming. No, it was mostly the embarrassing part that stuck with him as the light drained out of the sky and the blood pooled warm beneath his cheek.

  Five hundred and ninety-six years old. Domain Seed Realm. Second Stage. Domain Realm Seed.

  That's it. That's the whole story. Five hundred and ninety-six years and I'm sitting at second stage. Not even halfway to halfway.

  The cultivator who'd killed him hadn't even been trying that hard. That was the part that really stung. He'd just sort of... flicked Lark aside like a bug off a windowsill, and that had been that. No dramatic final battle. No speech. The man hadn't even looked at him twice.

  Lark stared at the cracked stone ceiling of the valley where he'd made his last stand and laughed, which came out more like a wet cough.

  "Two paths," he muttered to no one. "I had two paths and somehow ended up with nothing to show for either of them."

  That was the joke the universe had played on him from the very beginning. A Dual Path. Heavenly and Demonic, sitting side by side inside his Common-grade Core like two cats crammed into one box, both of them unhappy, neither of them willing to share. Most cultivators had one path. One direction. One truth that their soul screamed louder than everything else. Lark had gotten two, and for the first three hundred years of his life, he'd thought that meant he was special.

  It did not mean he was special.

  It meant he was slow. Twice as slow. It meant every bit of progress he squeezed out of the Heavenly Path bled into the Demonic and vice versa, like trying to fill two buckets with one ladle. Common Core on top of that, which was basically the universe's way of saying "good luck, pal" before walking away.

  He'd finally chosen at three hundred and twelve. A village, an invasion, a split second where he had to decide what he actually was at the core of everything. He chose the Demonic Path. He walked it every day since. And in two hundred and eighty-four more years, he had crawled from where he was to the second stage.

  Crawled. That's the right word for it.

  His thoughts drifted, the way they always did when things got quiet enough. He remembered a time before all of this. Before the cultivation world, before Aether and Cores and Paths and all the nonsense that came with them. He remembered a world with traffic jams and bad coffee and deadlines that felt like the end of the world but really, really weren't.

  He'd been in his fifties then. Still working at the office. Still single, which his mother had opinions about. He remembered the day the sky split open above the city like someone had taken a knife to it, and the world he'd spent his whole ordinary life in just stopped being the only world. A powerful figure had torn through from somewhere higher up, somewhere beyond, and everything Lark had ever known had ended in fire and noise and the sound of people screaming in the streets below his apartment window.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Turns out, his Earth was a root world. One of countless starting points scattered at the base of a vast, layered structure of higher realms and upper worlds. Ordinary people with ordinary lives, sitting completely unaware at the bottom of something enormous, like ants in the foundation of a cathedral. The figure who had come through hadn't even been trying to end things. It had just been a side effect. A footprint.

  I never found out what happened to them. Mom. Dad. Maya.

  He closed his eyes, and the ceiling disappeared, and the pain disappeared, and everything went very still.

  If only I could go back, he thought, right at the edge of nothing, I'll be faster. I'll be smarter. I'll figure out the Core before any of it matters. And I will find a way to stop what's coming before it even starts.

  Then there was nothing at all.

  And then.

  There was a ceiling.

  A different ceiling. Wooden beams, familiar water stain in the shape of something that looked vaguely like a fish. The smell of something frying in the kitchen downstairs, and the distant sound of his mother humming a song he hadn't heard in over five centuries.

  Lark sat up very slowly.

  Small hands. Small arms. The blanket was covered in cartoon animals he vaguely remembered loving at this age. His age. He looked at his hands for a long time.

  "I look like five," he said out loud. His voice came out tiny and ridiculous and he genuinely could not deal with that right now.

  He got up, legs barely long enough to reach the floor, and walked to the small mirror on the dresser. A five-year-old looked back at him with wide, dark eyes and messy morning hair. Still recognizably him. Just... incredibly small.

  I'm back. I actually came back. Holy molly.

  He pressed both hands to his face and stood there for a second.

  "Lark! Breakfast!" his mother called from downstairs, and he felt something happening in his chest that had absolutely nothing to do with cultivation.

  He walked out of his room and down the stairs, gripping the railing carefully because these legs did not have the muscle memory he was used to, and stepped into the kitchen.

  His mother was standing at the stove, still in her robe, spatula in hand. His father was at the table, newspaper open, reading glasses on. His older sister Maya was already sitting down, carefully picking the vegetables out of her eggs with the focus of someone defusing a bomb.

  "Good morning, baby," his mother said, and turned to look at him. "Why is your hair like that? What happened up there? Did you wrestle a pillow?"

  "...Good morning," Lark said.

  "Come here." She didn't wait. She just reached out, grabbed him, fixed his hair with her fingers in the way that was slightly too rough and completely non-negotiable, kissed the top of his head, and pointed at his chair. "Sit and eat."

  His father looked over the top of the newspaper. "Morning, bud. Sleep okay?"

  "Yeah," Lark said as he lets out a yawn. "I slept okay."

  Maya glanced at him sideways. She was eight, in this life. Already sharper than she had any right to be. "You're kinda weird today," she said.

  "I'm fine."

  "You look like an old man."

  "Maya," their father said, not looking up. "Eat your eggs."

  "I am eating my eggs."

  “Your vegetables too.”

  “Boo…”

  Lark sat down. His mother put a plate in front of him, eggs and toast cut into triangles because he was five and that was apparently how it worked at five. He stared at the triangles. He stared at the kitchen. He stared at his family, alive and ordinary and completely unaware of anything.

  The world ends. And none of them know it's coming. Well, technically, it’s years away but still.

  He picked up a triangle of toast.

  Not this time.