Zhang Lei was an ordinary office worker on Earth. After dying from overwork, he was reborn in a sword-and-magic world as Abel, the least welcome illegitimate son of the Winster family in the human empire.
His mother died young, leaving him with no maternal family to rely on. The legitimate heirs shunned him, and he had to cultivate a crippled technique that everyone else had rejected. At sixteen, his family treated him as a pawn to be discarded and sent him to deliver a letter to the remote Silvermoon Forest. Officially, it was a trial by experience. In truth, they were leaving him to fend for himself.
It was there that he first met Liliana.
She was the granddaughter of the Moonlight Elves' grand elder, but because her mother was human, the pureblood elves called her a "half-elf mongrel." Shunned, bullied, and driven to a dilapidated hut on the edge of the forest to fend for herself, she couldn't even find anyone willing to teach her the most basic life magic.
In his previous life, Abel could barely look after himself. He was timid and insecure. When he saw her surrounded and bullied, he lowered his head and hurried past. It was the decision he regretted most in his entire life.
Later, the Abyssal Calamity struck. Though cast aside by his family, he took up the mantle of a holy knight and headed for the battlefield. The girl he had once been too afraid to look at awakened the Moonlight Sacred Physique, guarded the Abyssal Rift alone, and ultimately burned away her soul to protect the entire continent.
As she lay dying, Liliana looked at him, covered in wounds, and said softly, "It's all right. As long as you're alive, that's enough."
Consumed by boundless regret, he smeared the blood from his heart onto his mother's only keepsake, an unremarkable black iron ring. When he opened his eyes again, he had returned to the age of sixteen, to the Silvermoon Forest, to the afternoon when she was surrounded and bullied.
May the flames burn through the night, and protect me as I become a god.
