Shadow Monarch in Tensura

Chapter 1: Chapter 1: New Life

I was floating in a never-ending pool of darkness.

How did I even end up here? Where am I? Who am I? Questions like that filled my mind as I tried to remember, but all my memories were blurry.

What the hell is going on? I started to panic.

I tried to move but found myself unable to move even a finger. I tied to yell, but not a sound came out. I couldn't hear anything, and I couldn't feel anything.

Time passed, and I was tired, so I just stayed there, floating, having given up on ever getting out of this place. Was it pathetic to just give up? Probably but I didn't care after spending however long I was stuck here.

More time passed, and my memories started to get clearer.

I was the youngest and had two older siblings. An older brother who treated me as his punching bag every time he was angry. No, he would treat me like that whenever he wanted to.

While my parents made me do everything from cooking, cleaning, and everything else they could come up with so I could stay inside the house or, more precisely, in the basement.

My older sister was the nicest out of my whole family by treating me like trash, not worth even looking at. She even gave me her old phone when she threw it at me one time, and it broke.

The screen was cracked, and the bottom part didn't work, but the top was still readable, and that's how I learned about light novels.

Reading them in secret every night so they wouldn't notice I had the phone. It became my favorite time of the day, just reading various novels in the dark and cold basement.

{Confirmation complete. Acquiring Resist Skill: [Cold Resistance]}

The other was the school library I could go to and read.

I was also happy in school. While the kids avoided me, the teacher treated me like every other student.

When I got my grades for the first time, I was excited, thinking my parents would be proud of me for the first time, but when I showed them to my parents, they could care less about my grades. On the other hand, my brother beat me up due to getting worse grades than me.

As I got older, I understood there wasn't anything I could do, so I just tried my best not to anger anyone, and so time flew by.

Then one night, after starting a new volume of a novel I had recently started reading, I went to sleep, and now I'm here.

Am I dead? Strangely I wasn't sad thinking that, having spent my whole life hearing things like; you are a waste of space, and you should just kill yourself. If anything else, this made me want to laugh, thinking that they would probably celebrate if I died.

Actually, death isn't that bad..

{Confirmation complete. Acquiring Ultimate Skill [God of Death: Hades]... Unsuccessful...}

{Repeating attempt... Failed.}

{Repeating attempt... Failed.}

{Downgrading Ultimate Skill [God of Death: Hades] to Ultimate Skill [Shadow Monarch: Ashborn]... Unsuccessful...}

{Repeating attempt... Failed.}

{Downgrading Ultimate Skill [Shadow Monarch: Ashborn] to Unique Skill [Shadow Lord]... Successful.}

[Warning body is in critical condition...]

{Confirmation complete. Acquiring Common Skill [Self-Regeneration]... Successful.}

Huh? A voice, so I'm not dead?

Then I felt pain spreading throughout my body, like millions of needles stabbing me.