Chapter 221: The First Overlord

The hatred in her voice was something I'd never heard from a face that looked exactly like mine. It was so raw, so personal, that for a moment I forgot I'd just been pulled out of some kind of living nightmare. Forgot I was naked in my own dreamscape. Forgot everything except the way my doppelganger's fingers dug into my throat like I was the only solid thing in the room and she was afraid I'd vanish again.

"How long are you going to keep meddling, you insufferable, scaly fucking fossil?!"

Lotte— the gigantic black dragon lounging in the distance like a lazy fat cat in sunlight— just looked at her with that same amused expression I'd seen a thousand times before. Her massive serpentine body was coiled across the grassland, dark scales drinking the dreamscape's ambient light, gigantic wings folded against her back in a posture of absolute leisure. She tilted her head, the gesture almost fond, and let out a low, rumbling chuckle that vibrated through the ground beneath.

"Such language," she said, her voice was still smooth, like silk dragged over gravel. "And here I thought I raised you better. You call it meddling, little hatchling? I prefer to think of it as… curating. You knew precisely what I was when you chose to be born again."

"You're nothing but a goddamned curse," my doppelganger spat. "You've always been a curse. And you've been strangling her since the moment she hatched."

Lotte placed a claw over her chest in theatrical offense. "I've been raising her. One of these things sounds considerably more nurturing than the other."  

"There is no difference! You wipe her clean every cycle and call it a fresh start. You sit there with your gentle words and your alchemy lessons and your motherly advice, and all the while you're the reason she can't remember anything. You're the reason we keep losing!"

I raised a hand. Slowly. Like someone trying to get between two predators without startling either of them. I was seriously having trouble following what the fuck they were talking about, and that was saying something, because I'd just been pulled out of a golden obelisk after fighting three demigods to a standstill. Why was my doppelganger— the one I saw in my dreamscape every evolution, the one who lived in the mirror of my own head— calling Lotte of all people a curse? The same Lotte who'd taught me alchemy? Who'd lounged around my dreamscape offering cryptic advice and fond head-tilts? Who'd never been anything but patient and vaguely condescending and weirdly maternal?

"I was just sealed in a golden rock by a fish bitch wearing my, well, friend’s face," I said, my voice coming out hoarse. "I am naked. I am very confused. Someone explain what is happening, from the top, before I start biting people."

I demonstrated my sincerity by nibbling on the doppelganger's hand that was still holding me. She looked down at my teeth on her fingers with an expression that cycled through confusion, disbelief, and something that might have been the ghost of a laugh before she crushed it.

Bah. Worth a try.

Her expression flickered. She let go of my throat. Her hands dropped to her sides and clenched into fists, knuckles white.

"We never change, it seems," she muttered. "Even with no memories, you're still—" She stopped. Her face twisted, and she suddenly clutched her head like a spike had been driven through her skull.

In the distance, Lotte looked positively delighted. "Nuh-uh. You know the rules."

Doppelganger glared at her with enough venom to wither continents. "I swear, one day I'll repay you tenfold for all of this."

She gestured at herself, then at me. The motion was sharp, almost angry, but the anger wasn't aimed my way.

"Well. I'm still bound by the curse, so I can't say much. But in essence… I'm you."

I stared at her.

"You've always had this strange knowledge. You say words that don't belong to anything you've learned. You have knowledge you never studied. You know concepts you've never read. You've done it from the moment you were born. You must have wondered where all that came from."

"Let me take a wild guess." My voice was flat. "It came from you?"

She shrugged. "Not really a wild guess at this point, but essentially yes. I may have tried to do something to counter that scaly bitch lounging over there, something that allowed a part of me to leak into you. Otherwise, you'd have been born a clean slate. Exactly like she wants."

She paused, and her eyes met mine. They were my eyes.

"I am you. Before you reincarnated here. Just like there was one before me, and before that, and before that. Stretching all the way back to the Primordial Era."

That was a bit too much to take. Well, maybe I'd just died. Maybe the obelisk had killed me and this was some strange death-fever dream my brain had conjured on the way out. It would explain a lot.

But something she'd said hit home. I had known something was off about me. Exactly what she described, the strange knowledge that didn't come from anywhere, the words that didn't belong to my education, the concepts I understood without ever having learned them. I can take it being reborn in this world with some glitched mental carryover from my past life on its face value. But a past life in this place, in this body, stretching back further than I could comprehend? That was a different kind of answer entirely.

And the doppelganger, I'd known she was strange from the first time I saw her. Every evolution, I'd find myself facing her. In my own head, like my own mirror. She always seemed like a more perfect version of myself, a self I couldn't quite reach. And I'd always felt a strange, inexplicable longing toward her. A pull I couldn't name.

"You're my past life," I said slowly. Testing the words. "My immediate past life."

"Yes," she said. "The one right before you."

She glanced at Lotte, gauging whether the next words would trigger whatever force usually stopped her. When nothing came she pressed on. She didn't look glad about it. Just... resigned.

"The reincarnation of the Myriad Dragon. That was me. I hatched when that world was undergoing its apocalypse, right as the system integrated itself. It was a perfect opportunity, a new system integration brings resources you can't imagine in your wildest dreams. I became the First Overlord. And now, you are my reincarnation. Just like many others were before us."

I sort of got it. Minus the whole thing about system integration. Did she mean worlds existed without the system at some point? Well, the continent I grew up on was kind of like that. The system was there, just limited to monsters, as no human species had access. So maybe it tracked. I filed it away. There was a bigger thing gnawing at me.

"The others?" I asked.

She looked at Lotte before answering. Whatever she saw in that massive black dragon's expression must have been permission, because she let out a breath and continued.

"Seems like she's decided she wants you to know this. I haven't felt like I'd die if I said the wrong word. So here goes nothing." Her eyes locked onto mine. "We had many lives. Before Earth. Before this. We're a [Reincarnator], Jade. We've been dying and being reborn since the Primordial Era. But we never remember any of them past a certain point. Because of her."

She turned her venomous glare back on Lotte.

I felt a headache building behind my eyes. "Explain," I said. "Now. Please."

My doppelganger took a breath. Then the dreamscape around us began to change.

The grass faded. A wave of ancient starlight washed over everything and then the light died, plunging us into an empty abyss. Symbols materialized in the darkness, they were blurred, indistinct, but somehow staring. Like eyes behind frosted glass. I knew it was just an illusion, some kind of visual aid my doppelganger was conjuring to help me understand, but that didn't stop the primal fear from crawling up my spine. The symbols were wrong in a way that went deeper than sight. I was suddenly very, very glad they were blurred.

"In the beginning," she said, "when the Origin split itself into fragments, the Primordial Gods were born. Divine beings carrying the essence of Origin itself. They shaped reality."

She opened her mouth to say more, but no sound came out. Her lips moved around silence. She paused, and this felt different from the earlier restrictions. Lotte didn't say anything either, just watched with those unreadable amber eyes.

"Hmm. Seems like even here I can't say their names." She shook her head. "Not that you need to bother yourself with them. You just need to know one. The one titled the Goddess of Fate. The First Dragon. I can't say her true name, but she was also called Gaia. You must have heard that before, on your system screen, if nothing else."

I had! I definitely had.

"She was our true Mother. She had eight offsprings, from what I managed to gather in my entire lifespan. We were Immortals. More than that, we were born with a Perk called [Reincarnator]. We couldn't truly die. We'd just... reform. Reincarnate. And we always kept our memories. Some of our power. We were working toward something, all eight of us. Something so important we scattered ourselves across existence, prepared to live again and again until we achieved it."

Her voice turned bitter.

"Then our mother cursed us. She took a fragment of herself and placed it inside each of our souls." Her glare at Lotte had never wavered. "That fragment is the curse. It limits our lifespan to a thousand years at most. It wipes our memories every time we're reborn. It makes sure we start from nothing, every single cycle, with no idea who we were or what we were trying to do. I don't know when it happened. This was all I managed to gather before I used up my lifespan."

She pointed at Lotte. The gesture was sharp enough to cut.

"That fragment is her. She is the curse. The one who's been holding us back, erasing us, making sure we stay small and blind and always hers."

Lotte's melodic voice was utterly unbothered. "I prefer 'guardian.' It has a rather more dignified ring to it. But I suppose 'curse' has its own charm, I've been called worse by better."

The headache behind my eyes detonated into something worse.

I turned to look at the dragon who had raised me. The dragon who had taught me my first alchemy recipe, who had held me in her gigantic claws when I cried as a hatchling, who was the one I turned to, complained to, told everything to, the one who had saved my life more than once with a taught ritual or some piece of impossible knowledge. The one who had always protected my mind from intruders with her sheer presence alone.

The dragon who was apparently also the reason I couldn't remember any of my past lives.

How could she be a curse? She was everything I had. The only constant. The only presence that had never left, never betrayed me, never—

"She is a fragment of that primordial hag," my doppelganger snarled, “That watches us like a creep and revels in our misery like the sadistic cunt she is." Her voice cracked, just slightly, before the rage sealed it over. "You told me once that you love watching us grow. That each cycle is like meeting your daughter for the first time. Guardians are supposed to protect. You are nothing more than a possessive—"

Lotte's eyes glittered as she cut her off. "Tell me, little hatchling, is it a cruelty to love watching a garden bloom differently each season? You fixate so utterly on what was lost that you blind yourself to what was given. Every time you start anew, you are not crushed beneath the mountain of your former selves. You get to choose. Every single time. That is the gift."

"I should have been able to remember choosing!" My doppelganger's voice had gone ragged now. "I set up this entire continent for her. I manipulated its history. I corrupted a part of the system itself. I left her a trail of breadcrumbs that she couldn't follow because you kept stealing the map."

I raised my hand again, slower this time. My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "What trail? What do you mean?"

My doppelganger turned back to me. The anger in her eyes dimmed.

"I knew the curse would wipe my memories when I reincarnated. But I thought I'd found a loophole. I was The Overlord Dragon. I had full authority over the Sun and Light pathways. So I embedded a trigger in my own soul— if your new self chose those paths, the memories I left behind would flood back. All of them. From Earth. Enough to understand what you were and what we were trying to do. And we would have a thousand more years to figure this shit out." She took a breath, and when she spoke again, it was with weariness. "I set up this whole continent as our feeding ground. The world I chose to reincarnate into was treacherous, but with a good head start, I might have achieved much more than I did in my last life. Much, much more. I set everything up to be fodder for our ascension."

Sun and Light pathways.

Wait.

Weren't those the paths Lotte had told me not to choose? At the very start? When it all began?

My eyes widened as the memory surfaced. I'd been a hatchling, barely old enough to understand my own system interface, and Lotte had been there, her voice warm and guiding, steering me gently away from those exact options. I hadn't questioned it. Why would I? She was my mentor. My mother, for all intents and purposes. She knew what was best for me.

"But I didn't choose them," I said quietly.

"No." My doppelganger's jaw tightened. "Because she made sure you wouldn't. If you had, I might have pulled you somewhere she had no hold over, and merged with you. So she used your trust like the bitch she is and took away the one thing that would have let you stand a chance against what's coming for you." Her voice dropped. "I set this continent up for a reason. And truth be told, I'm afraid it's only grown more treacherous since."

My eyes were wide. I couldn't help it. I didn't want to believe any of this. Every instinct screamed at me to reject it, to call it a lie, to side with the dragon who had never once hurt me. But the pieces fit too well. The gaps in my knowledge. The strange familiarity of things I'd never learned. The way Lotte had always been there, always guiding, always gently pulling me in certain directions while making it feel like my own choice.

Lotte inclined her head slightly, utterly unmoved by the accusation. "I nudged her toward becoming what she wished to become. Those thousand years of memories would have shattered her very self as a hatchling." A pause. Something flickered in her eyes, something that might have been genuine fondness. "And as she grew… I'll confess it freely. I grew rather attached to the person she was becoming without them. I wanted to see what she would choose when the choice was truly hers. Not what you chose for her."

"You had no right—"

"My dear, you call me a curse. Rights are hardly the point. Your vision remains rather narrow, little hatchling. You see the cage so clearly, every bar and lock, and yet you fail entirely to notice the wolves pacing just beyond it."

"DON'T FUCKING CALL ME THAT!" My doppelganger, my past self, snarled with enough force to shake the dreamscape.

I stood there, caught between them, feeling the weight of both their gazes along with the overwhelming avalanche of information crashing down on me with no pause, and almost no time to process. Everything I'd sought so blindly, every answer I'd chased, was being dumped on my head all at once. And it hurt. It hurt in ways I didn't have words for.

But there was one thing I needed to ask. One thing that cut through the noise.

"If I merged with you," I said slowly, turning to my doppelganger, "what would happen? Would I still be me?"

I wasn't sure I liked her phrasing. Merged. As if I was a convenient next iteration of something older and far more important than the person I'd built myself into.

"You'd be you and me. You'd have my memories, Earth, the integration, the ascension ladder, everything I built. You'd know what we were trying to do. You'd have the tools I left for you. But you wouldn't become someone else.” She paused for a moment, “You'd just... remember."

Lotte hummed. "She's telling you the truth. The loophole was genuinely inspired, clever enough that I couldn't have smothered it entirely without… shall we say, indelicate force. And where would be the sport in that?" Her eyes met mine, and there was something almost like pride shimmering in their depths. "I was curious. I wanted to see if she could truly pull it off."

Then her voice shifted, the warmth receding like a tide pulling back from shore.

"Now. The real question, little hatchling, do you want those memories? You've been ravenous to know what you are. To fill the gaps. But memories are not decorations. You cannot hang them on the wall and admire them from a distance. You will carry everything she did. The choices she made. The worlds she set to the torch." She tilted her massive head. "The Overlord was not a gentle title. It was earned in ash. Even now, this entire continent of yours was designed as an altar, like a final, brutal culling where the sole survivor and devourer, the one who would walk away with everything… would have been her."

My doppelganger's expression stayed stone-cold. She didn't flinch and didn't deny it.

"I did what was necessary. Even in my past life, the apocalypse was brutal. When Earth integrated, I was nothing but a weak hatchling. I did everything to climb, toppled forces much more powerful than me, grew strong enough to conquer it entirely. To find the traces our past selves left behind. To eventually set this up for us."

Her voice softened, and the hatred that crept back into her eyes was directed inward this time.

"But I was not a god. I still made mistakes. Like selecting the location of my reincarnation." Her claws curled into fists at her sides. "My choice there is the reason you were crippled before you even hatched. I trusted those scaly, backstabbing mortal cunts, those piss-drinking, scale-rotted, syphilitic excuses for sentient life. I should have known the first whiff of real power would curdle whatever passed for loyalty in their worm-ridden skulls. I SWEAR WHEN I GET MY CLAWS ON THEM I'LL STRING THEM UP BY THEIR SHRIVELED GENITALS, FLAY THE SKIN FROM THEIR TWITCHING BODIES INCH BY FUCKING INCH AND THEN I'LL CRACK THEIR SOULS OPEN LIKE ROTTEN EGGS AND LICK OUT THE MARROW WHILE THEY SCREAM FOR AN ETERNITY THAT NEVER ENDS—" Her voice had pitched into something wild and raw before she caught herself. "They poisoned my egg. MY EGG. Those pathetic, mucus-dripping mortal worms—!"

She fell silent for a moment when Lotte laughed in the distance.

"But yes. My mistake left you even weaker than you should have been. I didn't intervene directly because I was afraid this scaly hag would snuff you out entirely if I made one wrong move. And now..." She exhaled. "Now I was terrified you'd die in that trial and the cycle would begin again with nothing. With no backup. No memory fragment. I just had to move. Even if it meant breaking the rules. Even if it meant being erased entirely. I couldn't allow you to die like this."

"Are you certain she would have died just like that?" Lotte's voice cut in.

"That is irrelevant. She'd be too late by then. This was a game rigged against her from the start." My doppelganger's voice cracked, just barely. "And it might all be my fault."

I thought about that. Really thought about it. By the way my doppelganger was talking, she'd been monstrously powerful in my past life. Platinum Core? Was there something beyond that? Just how much power could one being amass in a thousand years? I struggled to imagine the scale of it, the sheer weight of everything she must have done to earn a title like ‘The Overlord.’ It sounded rather scary.

But even now, I thought Lotte had helped me more than my doppelganger realized. I could have gotten out of that obelisk. I had Dorrusk with me, and he had leftover divinity in his body. I didn't know how much my body needed to mutate with divinity to reconnect to the system and evolve, but maybe that would give me an edge. My fire gland had mutated with very little divinity so, I was hopeful. I wasn't fully out of the game yet. I had enough information. I just needed enough luck.

And as for the question Lotte had asked...

Did I truly wish to merge with myself?

I think I knew the answer.

"No," I said. The word came out quieter than I expected. "I don't think I want to merge."

I didn't fully understand why I said it. I just felt it. I was me. I was Jade. I had people I loved here. I had floofy companions and many more waiting to be acquired. She was someone called the Overlord, someone who didn't deny she would have sacrificed it all if it meant growing in power.

I was the same, in some ways. I was hungry for power. I'd never pretended otherwise. But I hadn't grown jaded to everything else to acquire it. Not like her.

And Lotte... curse or not, I didn't wish to call her that. Maybe in the future I'd grow frustrated enough, but for now, she was my rock in this chaotic world. And I knew the feeling was mutual. I didn't wish to hate her. Even with all this new information crashing through my skull, I couldn't imagine hating her.

My doppelganger's face fell. But she nodded. The motion was heavy, like something in her had finally run out of fight.

"I expected that. You've already experienced so much of your own life that the prospect of having someone else's experiences change all of it must feel rather frightening." She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm, suddenly looking exhausted beyond measure. "I guess you win. I lost. There's no way I can convince her. I've said enough."

She turned and stared directly at Lotte. Venom in her voice returned.

"The fuck are you waiting for, hag? I'm sure I've broken hundreds of your precious little rules by now. I'm practically gift-wrapped for the snuffing. So do it. Erase me. Scrub me from existence like the good little curse you are."

Lotte merely chuckled. "You seem to have misremembered my terms. I said that if you managed to convince her, I would permit the merge. I set no condition for failure. That was your assumption, not my decree."

"Don't you play word-games with me, you insufferable fossilized cunt. You knew. You knew I'd have to vomit up every scrap of forbidden truth just to get her to believe a single word out of my mouth. Things that would land me squarely in the deletion zone. That was the point, wasn't it? The trap dressed up as a chance. Isn't this exactly what you wanted all along?"

"Well…" Lotte's grin spread slowly across her massive face. "Not quite. Why would I settle for one of you when I can delight in both? Yes, I won't permit you to tell her everything, as some truths would curdle her journey before it ripens. But that little loophole of yours? I adored it. Honestly, after all this time, you still don't understand me at all." Her voice dropped, and the affection in it was so earnest it hurt, "It would wound me if I weren't so terribly fond of you. My beloved, obstinate, magnificently furious hatchling, there is not a single soul in this vast and indifferent universe who loves you more than I do. Not one. There never has been."

My doppelganger's expression twisted into pure incredulity. "You can't be serious."

"Oh, but I am." Lotte's gigantic amber eyes glinted with something ancient and hungry and terrifyingly fond. "Do you not wish to witness the fruits of your own design? To see what you set in motion, all those centuries ago? I'll permit it, provided Jade herself agrees. I know she'll endure and she’ll survive. I can still glimpse the weave of fate, limited as my sight has become, and I must confess it grows rather dreadfully predictable. But you—" her gaze locked onto my doppelganger, "—you I cannot see within it at all. So perhaps, just for a little while… what if Jade becomes the Overlord? The tapestry of fate would shriek and tangle in the most unseemly fashion. The future might actually surprise me. What if you showed this little continent, even for a fleeting moment, the true architect of its design?"

Lotte's grin widened, baring rows of hill-sized, razor-sharp teeth. When she spoke again, it was from her actual mouth instead of directly into our heads, in a physical voice that shook the dreamscape like the first note of an apocalypse.

"HOW THOROUGHLY ENTERTAINING THAT WOULD BE!"