Ch-13 I'm You

Naoya felt rage boiling inside him, remembering the humiliation and despair he experienced at the hands of Jason.

However, he calmed himself, remembering how he had already taken his revenge already.

After calming down, Naoya looked at Mike, the same man whose balls he had crushed 10 years ago.

But surprisingly, he managed to survive and even his balls somehow remained intact.

After his victory against Mike back in the fighting arena, the arena was shut down for six months.

6 months, which Naoya used to train and become strong enough to win fights without relying on underhanded tactics.

Once the arena reopened, Naoya remained the undefeated champion for two years.

This was a brutal phase in his life where he had to fight day and night, causing him to amass scars of all sizes all over his body.

However, scars weren't the only thing Naoya amassed in those 2 years, as he had also become filthy rich to the point he could live his whole life in luxury if he chose to step down.

But unfortunately for Lark and Jason, the fire of revenge burning inside Naoya instead of getting extuingished had only grown to the point where it threatened to consume him.

So with thoughts of revenge, Naoya willingly stepped down from his position, and using the wealth and connections he had amassed over the last two years, he formed his own gang.

However, the most surprising thing was Mike staying true to his words and not starting any conflicts with Naoya. Even though he only lost through underhanded tactics, he never complained.

Instead, over the two years, he and Naoya had developed a bit of friendly rivalry which, paired with strength, caused Naoya to make him his right-hand man.

*****

Five years later, Naoya's gang, the Crimson Tigers, had become the biggest and strongest gang in the whole underworld.

They practically ruled the entire underworld on the whole continent of Mankar.

At long last, Naoya finally had the power he had craved for the past 7 years, and now, with this newfound power, he has finally set his eyes on getting his revenge.

If he wanted, he could've  just killed Jason and been done with it, but he knew that he didn't go through everything he went through the past 7 years just to kill Jason.

He wanted him to experience a hell worse than what he experienced.

For the next 3 years, Naoya killed the whole Wingar family one by one, with a few-month interval between each death. Each death made it look like an accident.

Jason's 6-month pregnant wife Rachel, was also killed in front of him causing him to break down.

Naoya practically eliminated all drug distribution from the entire continent, which caused Jason to experience extreme withdrawal symptoms.

Wingar Industrials, a multibillion-dollar enterprise that took three generations of the Wingar family to get to the position it had, was slowly destroyed over the course of a year as Naoya started surfing the dark history and all the illegal activities they were involved in as he let the public do the rest of the work for him.

Jason at this point had lost all his family except for his dad; his body was ruined due to a drug overdose; his mental health was ruined due to trauma and withdrawal symptoms; and as he watched his family company crumble, he was always so proud of him.

This was hell; this was Jason's personal hell, orchestrated by Naoya.

This was the hell he experienced before he died at the hands of the boy he had forgotten about, a year after his departure from Rungar City.

*********

Now Naoya stood atop a rooftop; he had already resigned from his position as gang leader and made Mike the new leader.

He had decided a long time ago to end his own life once he took his revenge.

Naoya acknowledged that in order to kill Jason, he had become a true monster.

While no one in the whole Wingar family was innocent, they all had been accomplices in one crime or another, especially Rachel, who had multiple girls killed simply for having a crush on Jason.

Even during his years of trying to control the underworld, he never broke his own morals and never divulged crimes involving children, human trafficking, prostitution, or drugs. In fact, once he had reached his peak, he singlehandedly drastically reduced the crime rates of these crimes.

However, to Naoya, he had become the devil himself in the process of killing a demon.

He knew he was not going to go to the same place as his parents once he died, so he had no hopes of ever meeting them again.

However, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it, Naoya had received a notification of a novel that caught his interest two years ago called "The Mage Who Reached Infinity.".

It was a novel that caught his interest one day, and for some reason he decided to read it.

The novel wasn't very well written, and it was quite bland, honestly.

However, it used to update daily, and for some reason, Naoya found himself checking out this novel whenever it updated.

Seeing the update, Naoya decided to read the newest chapter before he ended it all.

However, there was something different about this chapter; it was different. The writing style felt professional; the usual grammatical and punctuation errors he had gotten used to in this novel were nowhere to be seen.

The characters, who usually felt bland and one-dimensional, felt real, almost like they were real people, instead of some random letters pieced together by a random dude on a screen.

The chapter lit a newfound fire inside Naoya; he couldn't die yet; he couldn't die without knowing how this novel ends.

**********

For the next 3 years, he religiously read the novel every day.

Over the past few years, he has read a bunch of webnovels, lightnovels, manga, manhwa, and manhua.

However, none of these left an impression on him as deeply as his first novel did.

Over the course of the past 3 years, something even more outlandish happened.

Naoya became obsessed with a concept that wasn't even real—a concept he didn't even know existed until five years ago.

This concept was mana, or more specifically, magic.

It started as a simple fascination with this newfound concept, whose whole existence revolved around making the impossible possible.

He thought about how easy his life would've been if he had this power back in his youth and how he would've never needed to suffer or become a devil, which he hated himself for.

His fascination grew into a longing for what he couldn't have, until eventually it transformed into an obsession.

He needed it; his life was incomplete until he got magic until he could reach the apex of it, just like how the protagonist of [Mage, who reached infinity] did it: the inner child inside Naoya, who was killed 13 years ago, was now revived.

After that, he searched everywhere for anything or anyone who could've given him what he needed, anyone who could've quenched the fire burning inside him.

However, it was all for naught, as Naoya eventually came to terms with the fact that magic didn't exist in the world he lived in.

The novel that kept him going for the past 3 years had long ended, and no other novel interested him that much.

He had no lover, as while he had a few one-night stands, Naoya didn't feel he deserved to feel happiness.

His gang was in capable hands, and he had no other friends aside from his gangmates.

So Naoya finally decided to do what he couldn't do three years ago, and he jumped off the building.

As Naoya fell, he only had one thought: a prayer. if magic and reincarnation were real, he wanted to be reborn in a world where he could practice magic.

It felt like a pointless, fleeting thought of a dead man; however, fortunately for Naoya, his prayers were answered.

***********

Now standing in front of William was a tall, brown-haired man with green eyes and a small scar near his face.

"So, does that explain who I am?" The man asked already, knowing the answer to his question.

"Yea," William calmly responded as he looked at the tall man standing before him.

"I'm you," said the man as both he and William started merging inside the dark room.

**

An:

There seems to be some confusion amongst readers despite my best efforts to make it clear but.

Naoya is just the past life of William, who had been reincarnated without his past life memories but now after getting [Memoirs Of The Great Sage] Ancient power he has reawakened his memories, basically all that these past 5 chapters have done is make William less naive, childish and arrogant and instead made him more mature with a deep love for magic and a proper goal but he's still the same person overall.