I Died Inventing Cultivation, Now the Heavens Call Me Genius

Chapter 9: The Man Laughing Inside Me

“Get away from him!”

Alexander lunged toward Nathaniel just as the unfinished eye on Ethan’s arm opened wider, releasing a thin beam of silver light. His sword flashed through the darkness, aimed directly at the professor’s chest, but Nathaniel twisted aside with surprising speed. The blade struck the stone floor, scattering sparks across the archive.

“Stop!” Emperor William commanded.

Alexander ignored him and raised his sword again. “He activated something inside my brother! You expect me to stand here and watch?”

Nathaniel clutched the silver device against his chest, his expression caught between fear and determination. “If you strike me, you might destroy the only thing preventing his consciousness from being overwritten.”

“Then explain what you have done!”

“I don't have time!”

A sharp laugh interrupted their argument.

Everyone turned toward Ethan, who lay in William’s arms with his tiny fingers curled around his father’s robe. Although his infant face remained unchanged, the black mark on his arm had spread toward his shoulder. Five silver lines formed a complicated pattern beneath his skin, and the unfinished eye at their center watched the room with unsettling awareness.

Inside Ethan’s mind, Shen Yu was laughing.

So this is how they intend to bring me back? By using a child’s body as a laboratory vessel? How wonderfully cruel.

Ethan struggled to silence the voice, but the laughter continued until it drowned out his own thoughts.

Who are you? he demanded inwardly.

The laughter abruptly stopped.

You already know who I am.

A memory flashed through Ethan’s mind, revealing a bloodstained laboratory, a shattered glass chamber, and a younger William standing beside an examination table while a masked figure discussed a fifth reconstruction.

Then Ethan noticed something he had overlooked before.

The child lying on the examination table had been breathing.

That child had been him.

No, Ethan insisted. I was Shen Yu. I lived as a researcher, and I died during my experiment. I remember everything.

Do you?

The question struck with the force of a hammer.

Another memory surfaced, revealing that Shen Yu had not been alone in his laboratory on the night of his death. Someone had stood behind the observation glass, watching as Si entered his body. A hand rested against the glass, displaying a black mark identical to the one on Ethan’s arm.

The figure had smiled just before the explosion.

Ethan desperately tried to see the stranger’s face, but the memory collapsed into darkness.

“Your Majesty!” Nathaniel shouted. “The fifth reconstruction has begun. Unless we separate the recovered memories from the infant’s consciousness, the process will consume both identities!”

William tightened his arms around Ethan. “Then tell me how to stop it.”

Nathaniel’s expression faltered. “You cannot stop it by force.”

“What can I do, then?”

“The prince must reject the returning consciousness himself.”

Alexander stared at him in disbelief. “He is an infant!”

“His body is an infant’s,” Nathaniel replied, glancing at the silver eye. “His mind is another matter entirely.”

William looked down at his son, and Ethan recognized the same desperate fear that had appeared in the laboratory vision. His father clearly knew more than he had admitted, although the emperor’s next words suggested that he did not understand the full horror of the situation.

“I promised I would never let them take you again,” William whispered.

Ethan heard every word.

Again?

Before he could question the emperor, the silver device in Nathaniel’s hand cracked. A pulse of energy swept through the archive, extinguishing the remaining lights. The walls dissolved into floating symbols, and the floor beneath William’s feet became transparent, revealing an endless abyss filled with suspended memories.

Voices rose from the darkness, some crying for help while others recited equations, prayers, and names that had been erased from history. Ethan recognized fragments of cultivation techniques among them, but the memories were broken, repeating the same desperate words.

We were promised eternity.

The heavens lied.

Do not let the Architect awaken.

A deeper voice suddenly drowned out the others.

“CONSCIOUSNESS CONFLICT DETECTED.”

“ORIGINAL IDENTITY: SHEN YU.”

“CURRENT IDENTITY: ETHAN COLE.”

“MERGER REQUIRED.”

Two figures appeared before Ethan, standing on opposite sides of a narrow bridge made of silver light. One wore the white coat of his former life and possessed the face of a man who had spent years pursuing an impossible discovery. The other wore the royal clothes of the Great Zhou Empire and had the face of a child who had never lived long enough to choose his own destiny.

They stared at each other.

“You are occupying my body,” Shen Yu said.

Ethan wanted to laugh at the absurdity of hearing his own voice speaking to him, but the fear in the older man’s eyes made the situation feel painfully real.

“This is my body,” Ethan answered. “I was born into it.”

“You were placed inside it.”

The words shattered Ethan’s confidence.

Shen Yu stepped closer. “Do you remember your first breath, your first cry, or the moment you opened your eyes and saw the world?”

Ethan searched his memories but found nothing. He remembered waking as a newborn, yet the experience had always felt like a scene he was observing rather than a moment he had truly lived.

Shen Yu pointed toward the darkness beyond the bridge.

“You were not born, Ethan. You were reconstructed.”

The silver light trembled beneath their feet.

Ethan shook his head. “My mother—”

“Was told to love you.”

“My father—”

“Was told to protect you.”

“And Alexander?”

For the first time, Shen Yu looked uncertain. “He may be the only one who was never told.”

Ethan’s thoughts raced as he considered the possibility that his mother’s tenderness, William’s protectiveness, and Alexander’s stubborn loyalty had all been arranged before he could remember anything. If his existence had been manufactured, how much of his life had someone else already decided?

Yet something inside him refused to surrender.

“Even if I was reconstructed, I am still Ethan Cole,” he declared. “My experiences belong to me, and my choices belong to me. You cannot erase me simply because you existed first.”

Shen Yu’s expression hardened.

“Then prove it.”

The bridge vanished beneath Ethan’s feet, sending him plunging into a sea of silver memories. Each fragment tugged at his consciousness as he watched his old laboratory explode, saw the masked observer smile, and heard a command spoken from somewhere beyond the walls.

“TRANSFER THE ORIGINAL RESEARCHER.”

Another memory appeared, showing a child inside a glass chamber while a woman wept outside it. She pressed both hands against the barrier and whispered, “I’m sorry, my son.”

Although the woman’s face remained hidden, Ethan recognized the black mark on her wrist. It matched the mark on his arm and the symbol he had seen on the figure behind the laboratory glass.

A terrible realization tore through him. The person who had watched Shen Yu die had not merely known about the experiment; that person had participated in it.

Ethan seized the memory before it disappeared, forcing its fragments to assemble into a single image.

For one brief moment, he saw the observer’s face.

Professor Nathaniel Hayes.

The memory shattered, and Ethan slammed back into his infant body with a strangled cry.

Inside the archive, Nathaniel staggered backward as the silver device exploded in his hand. William immediately raised his sword, placing himself between the professor and his son.

“You were there,” the emperor said, his voice dangerously quiet. “You were there when Shen Yu died.”

Nathaniel stared at his bleeding palm. “I never wanted him to die.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” Nathaniel whispered. “It isn’t.”

When he raised his eyes toward Ethan, his expression revealed something more disturbing than guilt.

It revealed recognition.

“Your Majesty, the fifth reconstruction was never supposed to begin today. Someone has activated it remotely.”

The silver eye on Ethan’s arm suddenly turned black, and a final message appeared across the transparent floor.

“RECONSTRUCTION INTERRUPTED.”

“ORIGINAL RESEARCHER RECOVERED: 7.4%.”

“EXTERNAL CONTROLLER IDENTIFIED.”

Ethan felt the archive shudder as something enormous stirred beneath the sea of memories.

Another message appeared, and its contents froze his thoughts.

“CONTROLLER: QUEEN VICTORIA COLE.”

Far above the hidden chamber, inside the imperial palace, Ethan’s mother slowly opened her eyes.

Then she smiled at someone standing in the darkness.