The Supreme Immortal’s Return To Earth

The Useless Son of the Vale Family

The nurse returned with a doctor.

Adrian watched them both. The doctor was a middle-aged man with tired eyes and a white coat that had seen better days. He spoke to Adrian in a language Adrian did not recognize—not at first. Then, slowly, the words began to resolve into meaning, as though his mind were translating something it had always known how to translate.

“—remarkable recovery. We didn’t expect you to wake for another week at least. Can you tell me your name?”

Adrian stared at him.

The doctor repeated the question. “Your name. Do you remember your name?”

A name. The question was simple. The answer was not.

He had been the Eternal Sovereign. He had been the Unbroken. He had been called many things—titles, epithets, curses whispered by enemies and prayers offered by those who hoped he might spare them. But none of those were names.

For a long moment, he did not know what to say.

Then something shifted in his mind. Not a memory, exactly—more like a door opening into a room he had not known existed. Information flooded through it. Memories. Sensations. A lifetime compressed into something he could almost touch.

Adrian Vale.

The name arrived as a certainty. It belonged to the body he was inhabiting. It belonged to the young man whose life had ended in this hospital bed.

Adrian’s lips moved before he decided to speak. “Adrian. Adrian Vale.”

The doctor’s expression shifted—relief, professional satisfaction, something else beneath it. “Good. That’s good. Do you know where you are?”

Adrian paused. The information was there, in the memories he had inherited. Ashford City General Hospital. Room 314. A city he had never seen. A world he had never known.

“A hospital,” he said.

“That’s right. You were brought in three days ago. Do you remember what happened?”

Adrian did remember. The memories were not his—they belonged to the original Adrian, the young man whose body he now wore—but they were vivid. Clear. Painful.

Three men in a parking lot. A demand for money the young man did not have. A beating that had continued long after he had stopped trying to defend himself.

“No,” Adrian said. “Not clearly.”

The doctor nodded, unsurprised. “That’s normal. Head trauma often causes memory gaps. We’ll monitor you for a few more days, run some tests. But honestly—” He shook his head, a small, disbelieving smile crossing his face. “You shouldn’t be awake right now. Let alone talking.”

Adrian did not respond. He understood why the doctor was surprised. The body he inhabited had been broken. Bruised. Fractured. By the standards of this world, the young man should have been in a coma for weeks.

But Adrian was not an ordinary patient.

Even now, even with his senses muted and his power reduced to something he could barely feel, his body was healing. He could sense it—a slow, steady process, independent of any technique he might once have used. His cultivation might not function here. His authority over reality might not respond. But his body had been tempered for ten thousand years. It did not forget what it was.

The doctor asked more questions. Adrian answered them automatically, drawing on the memories that were not his. His birth date. His university. His parents’ names.

Daniel Vale. Elena Vale. Sophia Vale.

The names meant nothing to him. Not yet.

The doctor left after a while, promising to check on him again. The nurse adjusted a machine beside the bed. Then she was gone too, and Adrian was alone with the silence and the beeping and the memories that were not his.

He closed his eyes. The memories came willingly.

A childhood spent in a house that was never quite big enough. A father who worked long hours and came home exhausted. A mother who smiled even when she was tired. A younger sister who yelled at him for being too timid, too passive, too afraid to fight back when the world pushed against him.

He saw the fall—the slow collapse of his father’s business, the arguments behind closed doors, the moment the family learned that the life they had built was gone. He saw the hospital bills. The empty savings account. The way his mother sold her jewelry and told everyone it was fine. The way his sister started working after school and refused to say how tired she was.

And he saw the young man—the original Adrian—trying to do something. Trying to help. Trying to be brave in the only way he knew how, which was not brave at all.

The young man had gone to meet the men who were threatening his family. He had not known what he was doing. He had been afraid. He had been alone.

He had not come back.