The small, dimly lit room was silent—save for the ragged breaths of the young devil sitting cross-legged on the cold floor. Just a few feet away, the crumpled, lifeless body of Marcus lay still, the last remnants of his existence drained.
Lucian Lux Raum stared at the corpse for a long moment. His lips twitched.
Then, he chuckled.
Soft at first. A low rasp of disbelief. Then louder. Louder. Until the chuckle became a full, unrestrained laugh that echoed off the cracked walls. The kind of laugh born from madness, joy, pain, and relief all clashing in the hollow of his chest.
It was a cacophony of his past suffering and his burgeoning triumph, a sound that purged years of bottled despair and replaced it with a volatile cocktail of triumph and barely contained hysteria. Every choked gasp for air between bouts of laughter felt like a liberation.
And just as suddenly as it came, it broke.
He sobbed.
Tears streamed down his face as the laughter died, replaced by a scream, a raw, primal sound that clawed its way out from deep within his soul. For minutes, he screamed, cried, shook, his body wracked by tremors that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with the seismic shift within him.
And then silence returned.
Lucian breathed in slowly, trembling. His eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot, stared at the floor, not at Marcus's body, but just through it, into a future he had never dared to envision.
He couldn't believe it.
For years, he had been convinced that one day he would die nameless in a ditch, forgotten, alone, broken. He had accepted it as an unshakeable truth, an inevitable end to a life devoid of purpose beyond mere existence.
Life had offered him no other path, only endless trials and betrayals that had hammered this cruel reality into his very bones. And yet here he was… alive. Not just alive. changed. Empowered. Reborn.
For the first time in years, he had power. Real power. Power to claw his way out of the gutter he had been thrown into. Enough to truly live, not just survive day to day like a rat dodging the fangs of beasts and betrayal, constantly scuttling from one shadow to the next, never truly safe, never truly free. The weight of endless fear and hopelessness had finally been lifted.
When he was reincarnated into this world, he had been confused. The transition had been jarring, a sudden snap from an unknown void into the small, fragile body of a three-year-old.
There had been no R.O.B. welcoming him with platitudes, no cosmic wish-granting genie offering him cheat abilities, no white room or the familiar terror of "truck-kun." Just death, darkness, and then, suddenly, he was here, sitting beside a devil woman with sad eyes and a bitter heart, whose very presence radiated a cold resentment he couldn't quite comprehend at such a young age before he remembered who he was.
It hadn't taken long to realize where he was. The Underworld. High School DxD. The land of overpowered perverts, absurd power scaling, and endless harems, a universe he had once consumed for entertainment.
It had seemed like a dream come true, a fantasy come to life.
It wasn't. The reality was a brutal slap to the face.
His father, a low-class devil, had abandoned his mother the moment she got pregnant. The man had simply vanished, no note, no trace, leaving a gaping wound of abandonment that festered in his mother's soul.
Dead, he assumed at first. But over the years, she heard whispers, fleeting sightings, rumors that the bastard still lived, he was alive and just running like a coward.
His mother, once a noble of decent standing, had named him Lucian Lux Raum, "Shining Light." That was the name she had picked for him when she found out she was pregnant, she had wanted him to be the light of their family.
But his father's abandonment had hurt her and the name she had given him hoping for him to shine for her and him became something else.
Lucian, meaning light could also betaken as the absence of it to some and in moments of unguarded cruelty, she often reminded him of that. A name laced with venom that chipped away at his young spirit.
"The shadow that devoured my light and swallowed my happiness." She would say.
She blamed him for her fall. She had given up everything for his father, and the deadbeat had simply vanished, leaving her disgraced and alone. She had tried to return to her family, pleading for their forgiveness and a return to her former status, but they refused her multiple times.
They had said she had disgraced them for tainting their blood by mixing it with a lowly lowborn, an unforgivable sin in their rigid society. In the end, it was decided that if she wanted to return to the family, She would have to rid herself of the taint, she was to abandon him, her supposed "taint." And she did, without a moment's hesitation, leaving a seven-year-old boy to fend for himself.
It appeared that it was a serious crime to kill devil children, pure devils especially, given the dangerously low birth rate of the devil race. So killing children was a serious crime. But again, they were devils.
Simply because you weren't allowed to kill them didn't mean you couldn't just let them die somewhere else or push them to take their own lives through sheer neglect. If he were an ordinary child, one without the stubborn will to survive of a reincarnator, he'd be dead. No roof over his head, hardly anything to eat, and no magic to defend himself. Nothing but the cruel indifference of the Underworld.
But Lucian refused to die.
At the age of seven, after she had abandoned him, he had spent a harrowing year with no roof over his head and hardly anything to eat, constantly on the run from dangers that stalked the alleys and wastelands. Every scrap of food was a victory, every night survived a miracle. It took him a while before he found a place that nobody seemed to care about, a crumbling, forgotten ruin of a building long decayed, and made it his own.
He scavenged relentlessly, learned the brutal laws of the street, and trained his small body to fight, to run, to survive. Six years after being cast away like trash, he had pulled through, struggled to learn what little magic he could on his own, trained his body to its limits, and even managed to find a precarious job hunting daemons, just enough to keep body and soul together.
If there was one thing he had learned since coming to this world, it was that it was vastly different from the anime, grimmer, more dangerous, and the power levels were far higher than what was ever shown in the comforting, albeit exaggerated, world of his memories.
He had thought that since he was a devil he could just use imagination magic and become OP, a protagonist ascending with effortless ease. But that was a hard lesson learned, a painful delusion shattered.
It may seem that it was OP, an ultimate power. But if so, devils wouldn't have been struggling endlessly with Fallens and Angels in a desperate fight. No, using Imagination Magic cost a lot of magic that sometimes wasn't worth the paltry effect it produced. He once tried to create a small water spell, a simple wave, and passed out after its creation, left vulnerable for hours.
Magic circles were something that were very important, intricate tools of power and now understood why Mc's used it, but he didn't have those, and even buying one cost an arm and a leg, a price far beyond the reach of a low-class devil like him. He had truly thought he would spend his days fighting, struggling, constantly on the brink of extinction, and eventually end up dying out there, just another forgotten corpse in the vast, unforgiving Underworld.
He had long given up on things like standing at the top of the world or being the MC of the story type of shit. Life had taught him that it was better to stick to his lane, to survive quietly, to expect nothing. But now, now he could dream as big as he wants because he had something to help him achieve said dream.
Meta Essence: The Essence of the Merchant.
It had revealed itself in his most desperate moment, a whispered promise from the depths of his being, and now its presence pulsed in the back of his mind like a second, more powerful heartbeat. It was like an intrinsic part of him now, a fundamental shift in his very existence.
-You are able to assess the value of anything you see. Any object, living being, or even a concept such as a person's emotions. This value can be equated to any other kind of value, whether it be a physical currency, raw energy, precious mana, or even intangible concepts like loyalty or a moment of happiness.
-By paying the value, you can gain ownership over that thing, or cause an effect, such as spending mana to cast a spell. This meant true acquisition, not just temporary borrowing. He could pay for skills, knowledge, inherent traits, or even abstract abilities, making them his own.
-You can sense, get in contact with, and appear to any entity you would like to bargain with and can sense when you're been asked for for a bargain.
-You can negotiate any sort of transaction with ease, with knowledge of loopholes and clauses.
-You can establish contracts for favors with other living beings in order to waive or reduce the value paid for the desired effect. This can include supernatural beings such as demons, angels, or even gods. This was how Marcus's fate had been sealed, a direct application of this profound ability.
-You may also act as a mediator between two parties, creating similar contracts and overseeing their execution impartially. This gave him a position of immense influence, a neutral arbiter whose word, backed by the Essence, was law in any agreement he facilitated. This could be a path to both wealth and subtle control.
-Once a contract is signed and sealed, you are linked to the other party or parties and will know when they are fulfilling their end of the bargain. This link lasts until the contract is fulfilled or all sides agree to break it off (should you include such a capability in the contract). This granted him absolute assurance and foresight, eliminating the risk of betrayal in any of his dealings. No one could ever truly cheat him again once a deal has been agreed on.
Any Meta Essence alone was enough to make someone a god, to elevate them beyond mortal concerns and struggles.
And he had one. He, Lucian Lux Raum, the discarded light, the nameless rat, now held the key to ultimate power. He was going to make damn sure he would never be in this position again, to be weak and helpless, to look into the future and see nothing but pain and suffering. Never again.
He clenched his fists, staring at the invisible dust of Marcus's corpse again, the lingering ghost of a man who had treated him like trash. Had left him to die. And now? Lucian had taken everything from him, leaving him with nothing but a final, agonizing scream.
His face was stone cold, not of joy, but of cold, resolute determination.
"Never again."
No more being powerless.
No more being cast aside.
No more dreaming small.
He would rise. Slowly, methodically, ruthlessly. The Underworld, neh the entire cosmos, would learn his name.
One day.
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