Chapter 828 - 838 - Starting Point

Chapter 828: Chapter 838 - Starting Point

The man reached Lucien first, and the relief on his face was so immediate that Lucien almost forgot the pain running through his body.

"My boy."

He crouched beside him without hesitation, checking Lucien’s arms, shoulders, and face as though expecting to find some hidden injury.

"You have been gone far too long. We thought something happened to you."

The woman knelt on Lucien’s other side and pressed a hand against his forehead.

"You’re cold."

Lucien could only stare at them.

Now that they were this close, the resemblance was impossible to dismiss.

The man looked like Luke, not vaguely and not merely enough to make Lucien suspicious. The similarities were too precise. The woman beside him carried the same familiarity.

Cienna.

The memories inside this body recognized both of them immediately. They were not strangers who merely resembled people from Lucien’s future.

They were this young man’s parents.

Luke and Cienna.

Lucien’s thoughts stalled.

Luke noticed his silence and frowned.

"You can hear me, right?"

Lucien opened his mouth, but nothing useful came out.

Cienna studied him for another moment before her expression shifted.

"Did you eat that purple mushroom again?"

Lucien blinked.

Luke let out a tired sigh.

"I told you not to touch those."

Cienna glanced at him.

"That can wait. He’s clearly hurting."

She brushed some dirt from Lucien’s cheek while he remained silent, trying to process far too many impossible things at once.

The young man was named Lucien.

His face resembled Lucien’s own.

His fractured identity had accepted Lucien’s soul without resistance.

And now his biological parents were Luke and Cienna.

Lucien genuinely did not know which part of that deserved his attention first.

Luke seemed to take his silence for exhaustion. He turned and crouched in front of him.

"Come on."

Lucien stared at his back.

"You can barely stand."

Lucien considered refusing, but the moment he tried to put weight on his legs, pain spread through his body and settled the matter for him.

He sighed inwardly.

Being carried was embarrassing, but dying in an ancient forest because he was too proud to accept help would have been much worse.

Lucien allowed Luke to lift him onto his back.

The body he now inhabited was light enough that Luke carried him without difficulty, while Cienna walked beside them as they started back through the forest.

"You really frightened us," she said after a while. "Something strange happened in the village too."

Lucien’s attention sharpened.

Cienna looked ahead as she continued.

"The crops changed all at once. The animals became weak, and even the wells started drying faster than they should."

Luke frowned.

"Then food fell from the sky."

Lucien closed his eyes for a moment.

Hunger.

So this really was the village.

Cienna glanced upward through the trees, as though half expecting another miracle to appear.

"Some people think the gods saved us."

Lucien said nothing.

He remembered releasing food over the village. He remembered restoring water, protecting the fields, and cutting Hunger’s influence away before dragging the Incarnation into his inner universe.

Now he was returning to that same village on Luke’s back as someone who had apparently lived there his entire life.

The absurdity of it almost made him laugh.

Cienna noticed.

"You’re smiling."

Lucien immediately stopped.

"Was I?"

Luke glanced over his shoulder.

"That mushroom really did something to you."

Lucien decided that defending himself would only make the situation worse.

They continued walking.

As the forest slowly thinned, more fragments of memory surfaced naturally.

A bend in the path felt familiar before they reached it. Lucien knew there would be a split tree farther ahead, and moments later it appeared exactly where the memory said it would.

He recognized the sound of a shallow stream before it came into view and instinctively knew where the roots crossed the road and where the ground became soft after rain.

The memories did not feel like information being handed to him.

They felt lived.

That unsettled him more than he expected.

The System had not merely restored names and scattered images. It had allowed the surviving identity of this young Lucien to settle around his soul strongly enough that the life attached to it could be remembered again.

Lucien still knew who he was.

His memories of Lootwell, the future, Alanthuriel, the Incarnations, and everyone waiting for him remained intact.

Yet those memories now existed beside another life.

He remembered childhood days that he had never lived, ordinary habits he had never formed, fears that had never belonged to him, and affection for people he had only just met with his own eyes.

For a moment, Lucien looked toward Luke and Cienna without saying anything.

Fracture’s attack felt uglier now.

This young man had not been some faceless historical target.

He had parents who went searching when he failed to return home.

He had a place to sleep, people who knew him, and a life ordinary enough that nobody around him could have imagined beings from another era would cross history just to kill him.

Lucien’s gaze lingered on Luke before shifting toward Cienna.

The resemblance continued to bother him.

Was this coincidence?

Was it something inevitable?

Or had Lucien stepped into a place in history that had always been connected to him in ways he had never understood?

The possibilities multiplied quickly.

Lucien’s expression gradually became serious.

If Luke and Cienna existed here, then who else might appear in this era?

More importantly, what had this young Lucien been supposed to become?

Nothing in his memories explained why Fracture had targeted him, yet the Arch-Lords and Primordial Incarnations had treated his death as important enough to justify altering the past itself.

Lucien was still turning those questions over when the forest finally opened.

The village appeared ahead.

He recognized it immediately.

Simple houses stood along rough paths, with wooden fences separating gardens and small plots of land. Beyond them, the fields were still recovering from Hunger’s influence.

Villagers moved between the houses carrying the food Lucien had dropped earlier. Some laughed with the unsteady relief of people who had expected to starve. Others cried openly while gathering grain into baskets and cloth sacks. A few stood around the piles of food as though they were afraid everything would vanish if they looked away.

Lucien watched the village quietly.

This was where Hunger had tried to change history.

It was also where Fracture’s true target had lived.

Now it was the place Lucien had to begin again.

Several villagers noticed Luke carrying him and turned to look.

As more faces appeared, familiar impressions stirred through the young man’s memories. Some names surfaced immediately while others remained just beyond reach, but the important part was obvious.

These people knew him.

They expected him to know them too.

Lucien finally understood that surviving Fracture had only solved the first problem.

Now he had to live the life that Fracture had tried to erase, while having no idea what history actually expected that life to accomplish.

His body throbbed again, reminding him that he was in no condition to solve anything immediately.

Lucien let himself rest against Luke’s shoulder and looked toward the village.

This place had nearly been starved out of existence only a short while ago.

It had survived.

So had he.

Whatever history had once expected from the young man whose life he now carried, Lucien would have to discover it from here.