Six years passed. Six years of isolation, struggle, and drowning in endless savage intent. Six years in which Ashen became part of this hell—no, he became the hell itself.
There was no day or night, only seasons of blood and endless whispers of madness. Everything around him had become an echo of his decaying mind. The beasts had long disappeared, yet their wild intents still wandered like lost ghosts searching for new flesh to devour.
Ashen no longer fought them. He absorbed them as naturally as breathing. His body had turned into a primitive machine for survival, and his soul became a constant battlefield between purity and savagery.
But in the sixth year, he began to hear a new sound inside his head—a faint crack, like a shard of glass slowly breaking in the depths of his awareness.
At first, he ignored it, thinking it was just another illusion, one of the countless voices he had heard before. But the crack widened, and soon he began to hear a faint spiritual groan coming from the deepest part of his being. When he focused, he realized the horrifying truth: his soul could no longer endure.
The "Heavenly Records of Pure Soul" had been working without rest for years. Every time he used them to cleanse the savage corruption, they consumed a piece of his consciousness. Over time, the process became like putting out fire with fire—it purified, but it also burned something essential with it.
"I've reached the final limit…" he muttered with a weary, hoarse voice, as if speaking to the echo of himself.
In his Sea of Consciousness, which he had mastered completely, he saw waves of gray mist covering the surface. The pure soul within was weakening, cracking from the inside, and every passing second brought him closer to complete madness.
Yet in his eyes burned that same foolish glint—the kind only seen in those who have chosen to face the impossible.
As he sat amid the silence and blood, a strange thought flashed through his mind—a thought so insane that any ancient sage would call it suicide.
"If the Heavenly Records have reached their limit… then maybe I must create something beyond them."
He knew that his soul now possessed the Sea of Consciousness—an endless inner realm he had opened through years of meditation, where he could see everything related to his spiritual essence.
There, in the depths, he saw his soul embryo—a small, faintly glowing humanoid figure curled in a fetal position, its light dim and flickering.
That embryo was his true soul, the mirror of his existence. And now, it was on the verge of collapse.
Ashen closed his physical eyes and dove completely into his Sea of Consciousness. His body disappeared, and his senses turned into pure awareness floating in the void. The darkness around him couldn't be seen, but it could be felt—it was like an ocean of ancient whispers, each wave speaking in a forgotten tongue.
At the center, the soul embryo floated in fragile peace. When Ashen approached, he felt a strange warmth radiating from it, like the memory of something long lost.
"All these years… I've been protecting you from the corruption, and now you're the one fading."
Then an even crazier idea struck him. He knew that within his primordial bloodline slept ancient symbols—blood runes, each holding a piece of inherited primal power. The strongest of them, which he had only used in the most desperate moments, was the Rune of Devouring.
He decided to copy it—not onto his body, but onto his soul. He would carve it directly onto the soul embryo itself. If he succeeded, his soul would gain the power of devouring—it would never again need to separate savage intent from itself, but would consume and feed on it instead. If he failed, everything would collapse into nothingness.
Ashen sat in meditation, raised his hand within the Sea of Consciousness, and red symbols of dark crimson light began to form between his fingers. They twisted slowly, emitting sounds like heartbeats, as if alive and feeding on his will.
He directed his spiritual voice toward the source of his bloodline power—a dark core floating in the deepest part of the sea, a tiny point radiating sacred dread, each pulse making the entire sea tremble.
When his awareness touched it, the world seemed to twist. A cosmic roar shook his being, and the runes surged from the core as though they had been calling to him since eternity.
He grasped the copied rune with his mind and moved toward the soul embryo. For the first time in a long while, he felt true fear. A single mistake could cause the embryo to explode—and with it, his entire soul.
He began to carve.
The process was slow and heavy. Every stroke of the rune upon the embryo's abdomen produced a spark of red light, and the embryo screamed silently inside his mind.
The screams weren't sounds, but waves of pure spiritual pain—each one piercing Ashen's consciousness like a spear of fire. With every new carving, the embryo trembled more, and the sea grew more chaotic, until blood began to drip from Ashen's nose and eyes in the physical world.
"After all this… I won't stop now!"
He kept carving even as the pain became unbearable. The light in the sea began to fade, and cracks appeared on the soul embryo—small at first, then spreading like a chain of tiny explosions.
Ashen felt a true internal collapse. Everything around him started to fall apart—colors, sounds, thoughts. Even consciousness itself began to fragment.
"Is this… my end?" "My end?" "No. I refuse that." "I refuse." "My debts aren't repaid." "Not yet." "My revenge hasn't been done." "Not yet." "Nine centuries of pain wasted in a meaningless end?" "I refuse." "I refuse." "I refuse." "I refuse!" "But does the refusal of the weak even matter?" "What meaning is there?" "What purpose?" "What goal?"
"What a shame."
Then, everything stopped.
Time itself froze. Even his thoughts ceased to move. The silence that followed was terrifying—deeper than any noise he had ever known.
And from the depths of the Sea of Consciousness, his bloodline awoke.
It was a massive mass of crimson light, slowly spinning like a vortex of life and death. Each pulse echoed like ancient drums.
It moved toward the cracked embryo and wrapped it completely in a glowing layer of blood. The cracks began to vanish one by one, and the embryo started to breathe again.
But the layer wasn't just protection—it was living blood, moving, merging, and changing the embryo from within.
With each pulse, the embryo's color shifted from pale white to bright red, then to deep blood crimson, until it resembled a heart beating with life.
Suddenly, a mighty voice echoed through the sea—not from any creature or god, but from existence itself.
"You have reawakened the Primordial Blood…"
Ashen opened his eyes within the Sea of Consciousness and saw something beyond imagination.
Above him, on the unseen ceiling of the sea, two enormous eyes formed—the same eyes he had seen years ago during the trial of body and soul. The eyes that had looked upon both his flesh and spirit, the eyes he had absorbed without understanding their nature.
Now they had returned—not as an external entity, but as part of his own awareness.
They looked at him, then slowly broke apart into dusts of light, melting into the blood-covered soul embryo.
When the fusion ended, the soul embryo opened its eyes for the first time.
They were not human eyes—they were the same giant eyes, now smaller but filled with endless depth, knowledge, and dread.
The embryo was no longer pale or fragile. It had become something entirely new—the Primordial Blood Embryo. It floated within the sea, pulsing with indescribable energy, radiating an aura of majesty and awe, as if the ancient beings themselves bowed before it.
When Ashen recovered from the shock, he realized something within him had changed completely. Every fiber of his soul trembled with a new sensation—one that felt unlike anything he had ever experienced.
He looked again at the sea and saw the Rune of Devouring clearly engraved on the embryo's abdomen, glowing dark red like a living heart.
The embryo's body radiated a silent devouring force, absorbing even the surrounding spiritual mist and turning it into pure energy that spread through the entire sea.
"I did it…" Ashen whispered in awe and caution.
But deep down, he felt that not everything that happened was his doing. The eyes, the bloodline's reaction, the moment when time itself stopped—all of it went beyond his understanding.
He remembered his father's words from long ago:
"Our bloodline, my son, is not just blood—it is will. When placed in mortal danger, it decides who lives and who dies."
Now he understood. What happened wasn't coincidence—it was his bloodline's response, perhaps awakening something older and more dangerous than he could ever imagine. Yet, that disturbing feeling in his chest remained—the sense that something unseen was guiding him, shaping his path, controlling his fate. That hateful feeling never left him.
Ashen extended his awareness from the Sea of Consciousness back to the physical world. The corpses of ancient beasts still lay scattered around him. He exhaled slowly and activated the new rune.
In an instant, a wave of dark crimson energy burst from his body, spreading hundreds of meters around him. All the lingering savage intent in the area was pulled toward him at terrifying speed, as if space itself was collapsing inward.
The savage intent he once feared had now become nourishment for his soul.
He devoured it, absorbed it, and with each passing second, his blood-red eyes glowed brighter.
But with every surge of power, he began to hear new whispers forming in his mind—as if the eyes within his soul embryo were speaking in an ancient language he couldn't understand.
A language of blood itself.
When everything finally quieted, Ashen sat in long silence. The sky above was colorless, the earth around lifeless.
Yet inside him, a new storm was forming—not of savagery, but of something deeper: a will that lived within both blood and soul.
"The Heavenly Records purified the soul…" "But me… I don't even know what I've created."
He smiled—a smile of a man who had tasted death and no longer feared it. Behind that smile, quiet flames waited to burn once more.
In his Sea of Consciousness, the soul embryo opened its eyes again, and on its lips appeared a faint, mocking smile—the smile of life mocking fear.