Demon King

CH- 01: Life after death.

Ric.

I always had one wisp of light, which shone with such dim light that one will miss it inside the abyss I hold, yet that damn minister struck right at it as if he noticed where the wisp was.

Destruction and healing are fundamentally novel concepts. I hated the light, but still needed to keep it alive to stay alive.

People say the undead have no light.

Those people are dumb, do not trust them. I tell them not to trust themselves.

There is no way a person doesn't perceive that they are stupid. It's fundamentally impossible to be that stupid.

To survive, one has to kinder their light throughout their life.

The higher forms of life, the way those imbeciles referred to themselves before I stepped up, had a dazzling light or the smallest spark within them.

For the foremost, one has to hack away at a never-ending pillar of light, and for the latter, one can never find the light. Both give the illusions of immortality, but I snuffed out enough lights to differentiate a myth from reality.

Yet I find myself in a new world, a stranger's body, and all of my memories intact.

Was I still alive or was this life after death?

Ric goes through a quick checklist to confirm his suspicions.

'A pathetic body, lost all touch with darkness, a binding light which won't stop following me, a heart which wants revenge! ha... at least one thing is from my old body, and being carried around by an old lady who, for the gods I killed, won't stop crying!'

'I am in hell.' Ric confirms.

"The boy lives!" Mary screamed within herself, containing her excitement. "This—He is a miracle gifted to us by the gods. I will not let him die." She promises the heavens.

Warm tears gushed down Mary's eyes, dripping over Ric, healing, comforting him with every drop, and Ric hated every second.

'Put me down, you old hag!' He wanted to scream, yet his burnt throat only raged in agony.

Ric was used to pain.

He trained for a decade to get used to pain, but all he brought along for the trip was that pathetic light that a dumb minister could not extinguish.

'I mean, how hard is it to kill someone? That is all we demons are supposed to be good at, and he sucked at that, too.'

Ric did not bother with trivial stuff, like how or why he survived. Being a demon has its perks. They never sweat the small stuff.

Demons always live by the saying, 'It is what it is,' and the Demon King stood at the peak of said attitude.

This new turn of events opened up the possibility of immortality, though.

If a soul never dies and keeps reincarnating inside another shell, isn't that called immortality?

Did he somehow disprove a traditional story, turning it back into a myth?

Reincarnation without memories is mortality.

While the concept of a true soul never dying is a myth, reincarnating with your previous life's memories should be considered immortality because a person's choices make memories, which in turn makes a path from which a person's character is born and bonded with a soul.

If said character dies and reincarnates in another soul with the exact bond, the character gets to live past their due date. Continue shifting the due date and the person becomes immortal.