Centuries passed… or maybe just a moment.
In this place, time wasn't a line—it was an open wound that bled again each time it tried to heal.
Ashen no longer knew where he had started, nor where he was going.
His steps had no meaning, but every one of them woke him from death and returned him to it at the same time.
His body had become something that wasn't yet meant to exist.
The flesh attached to him sometimes pulsed with a rhythm unlike his own heart, and veins stretching from his chest branched into the ground before returning to feed him.
He had become part of the being that carried him.
He no longer walked on the ground—the ground walked him.
In a rare moment of awareness, he lifted his head toward the red horizon and whispered in a hoarse voice:
> "Am I… still me?"
But the answer didn't come from outside.
It came from within—from another self forming deep inside his chest, where his breaths mixed with the earth's.
> "I am the earth.
I am pain.
And I am you."
The voice wasn't a whisper—it was a vibration in his blood, echoing as if his blood itself had begun to speak.
Every drop screamed with fragments of his old self, his fading humanity.
He felt his memories being pulled away one by one—
his mother's face, his brother's laughter, his father's final look—all of them turning into fleshy faces smiling at him from the living walls around him.
Those faces called his old names, then laughed when he didn't respond.
At first, he resisted. He screamed, tore the flesh with his hands until he was covered in blood.
But each time, the earth restored itself and returned him to the same position—standing, trapped, listening to himself disappear.
Every attempt to escape brought him back to the beginning.
And with every new cycle of time, he lost a new sense:
In the fifth cycle, he lost his voice.
In the tenth, the feeling of heat and cold.
In the fiftieth, he forgot his own face.
And in the hundredth… he forgot why he was resisting at all.
---
In heavy silence, he realized he could no longer feel pain.
The earth that had once torn him apart now began to feed him something else—a dark warmth flowing through his veins.
Every beat from its giant heart grew something new inside him:
a strange power, distorted and wrong.
When he focused, he could hear two heartbeats—one his own, and one belonging to the earth.
> "Now you understand, son of blood…"
"You cannot take revenge without becoming the pain itself."
It was the Savage Intent, without a doubt.
But this time, it wasn't an external force—it was a creature forming inside him.
With every pulse, it laughed, whispered, tempted him to surrender completely.
As his soul cracked like glass slowly breaking apart, he heard himself laugh—for the first time in centuries.
A faint, dry laugh, empty of life.
But it didn't stop.
It bounced from the living walls, then from the earth's heart itself, until the whole space echoed with a red laughter.
A wild laughter that no longer belonged to a man.
Revenge. Revenge. Revenge.
Revenge. Revenge.
Revenge.
---
Then the red sky began to move.
The mist twisted into a vortex of flesh and blood, and at its center formed a giant eye made of thousands of human eyes fused together.
It watched him.
When he looked back, he felt his soul being pulled from his chest.
"Do you surrender?"
"Revenge."
Only one word kept repeating in Ashen's head—a tiny spark that refused to die, lighting the endless darkness of time and torment.
The first trial… was over.
His whole body trembled, and suddenly light exploded from within him.
It wasn't pure light—it was a mixture of blood, ash, and red sparks bursting from every pore.
A scream tore from his mouth, so long and deep that the air itself broke apart.
The ground shook, and the faces made of flesh began to melt, screaming with his own voice.
In that moment, a small crimson core was born inside him, spinning slowly between his ribs.
Each pulse burned away the flesh stuck to him and redrew his form anew.
It wasn't ordinary power—it was the manifested Savage Intent.
He had absorbed it… or perhaps, it had allowed him to live within it.
---
When everything stopped, the vast plain had turned to red ash.
The ground was gone, the mist had lifted, and only he remained—standing alone in emptiness.
But his body was no longer the same.
His skin had turned gray with a red hue, and his eyes glowed with a faint light that no human could possess.
On his chest, a strange mark pulsed—a living scar shaped like a bloody spiral.
He could feel two heartbeats inside him: the rhythm of a man, and the rhythm of the earth.
Then a deep, directionless voice echoed once more:
> "Live another hundred years… and you will understand."