There was no light in the Abyssal Pit. There hadn't been for ten thousand years.
To the elders of the Blood Lotus Sect, who reigned from the sunlit peaks above, the Pit was little more than a garbage disposal. It was a mass grave for their failures. Newborns born without spiritual roots. The crippled. The assassinated. They tossed their unwanted into the dark to feed the slumbering god below, praying to earn a fraction of its ancient blessing.
They didn't know the god was already dead.
More accurately, it had been devoured.
A boy stood in the pitch-black cavern, his bare feet submerged in a puddle of fresh, warm blood. He had no name. He had never needed one. For sixteen years, his entire reality had been the suffocating dark, the shrieks of dying monstrosities, and the cold, mechanical calculus of survival.
He stared at the corpse at his feet. It was another boy, roughly his age, clad in the bloodstained grey robes of an Outer Court disciple. His throat had been cleanly slit—the efficient work of an assassin—before the body was tossed down the chasm to hide the evidence.
'He is weak,' a voice rumbled, not in the cavern, but directly against the inside of the boy's skull. The psychic weight of it was immense, dripping with an ancient, cosmic malice. It was the Void God—or at least, what remained of it after pouring its essence into the boy's hollow soul. 'His meridian channels are pathetic. Like cracked glass. Why do you hesitate, Vessel? Consume him. Leave nothing but ash.'
"No," the boy replied aloud. His voice was a dry, unused rasp. There was no anger or defiance in his tone, only cold calculation. "If I eat him, I am still trapped down here. If I wear him, I can go up."
Kneeling in the gore, the boy worked with clinical precision. He stripped the dead disciple of his robes and untied the small spatial pouch at his waist. Finally, he pried a smooth jade token from the corpse's stiffening fingers, running his thumb over the carved characters.
Dver. Outer Court. Rank 98,412.
"Dver," the boy whispered. He tested the syllable on his tongue. It tasted like dirt. Like a stepping stone. "I am Dver."
'A fragile skin for a predator,' the Void God mocked, its telepathic tone thrumming with dark amusement. 'They will sense the Abyss inside you. The moment you step into the light, their Elders' spiritual sense will crush you like an insect.'
"Then we will make ourselves small," Dver answered into the dark.
He closed his eyes. Deep within his core, an infinite, terrifying expanse of suffocating gravity churned—the power to erase existence itself. Slowly, agonizingly, he began to cage it. He locked away the terrifying pressure of an apex predator, burying it beneath layers of fabricated weakness. He intentionally fractured his own aura, forcefully cracking his spiritual pathways to mimic the pathetic, leaky Qi of the dead boy.
He violently coughed, spitting a glob of black blood onto the stone as the sheer strain of shackling a god tore at his internal organs. He wiped his mouth, his face completely devoid of emotion.
Perfect. Now, he didn't just look weak. He felt weak.
Dver turned toward the sheer, vertical rock wall of the pit. And he climbed.
For hours, he hauled himself up the jagged, blood-slicked stone. His muscles screamed in protest, but his mind remained terrifyingly still. The air grew thinner, then colder, until finally, for the first time in his entire existence... he saw light.
A pale, sickly blue glow filtered through a massive iron grate sealing the top of the chasm. Trembling with exhaustion, Dver pulled himself over the final ledge, his bloody fingers wrapping around the cold iron bars. He dragged himself into a damp stone corridor. Up here, the air tasted alien, thick with the scent of burning incense and ozone.
But he had no time to process this new world. Heavy, disciplined footsteps echoed down the hall. Cultivators.
'Enforcers,' the Void God hissed, a dark, primal hunger suddenly flaring in Dver's mind. 'Three of them. Foundation Establishment realm. Let me out, Vessel. Let us eat them.'
'Silence,' Dver commanded his passenger.
He listened as the Enforcers rounded the corner. Two men and one woman, draped in the black and crimson robes of the Sect's lawbringers, their spiritual lanterns casting long, harsh shadows against the stone.
"I'm telling you, I heard something by the grating," one of the men grunted, his hand resting casually on the hilt of a curved saber.
Dver calculated his odds in a heartbeat. He was covered in blood, wearing the clothes of a boy who was supposed to be a corpse. If he fought, he would reveal the Void, and the entire Sect's wrath would descend upon him.
There was only one play.
In a fraction of a second, the cold, dead-eyed psychopath vanished.
Dver violently threw himself backward against the iron bars of the grate. He unleashed a ragged, throat-tearing scream, his eyes blowing wide with absolute, primal terror. He slumped to the cold floor, violently shivering, and wrapped his arms tightly around his knees like a broken, traumatized animal.
"P-please!" Dver shrieked. Tears instantly welled in his eyes, his breathing a perfect mimicry of the panicked hyperventilation of a coward who had just narrowly escaped hell. "The shadows! They ate him! Please, don't send me back down!"
The three Enforcers froze, weapons drawn in a flash of steel and Qi.
The lead Enforcer, a towering man with a cruel scar running through his lips, stepped forward. He leveled the tip of his saber mere inches from Dver's throat. The man's spiritual sense washed over Dver—a cold, invasive pressure probing for strength.
Dver held his breath, keeping the Void caged tight beneath his fractured aura. Look at me, he thought, sobbing outwardly while his mind remained as still and unforgiving as a frozen lake. Look at the pathetic trash.
The Enforcer's eyes narrowed in deep suspicion. He pressed the blade forward, just enough to draw a single, hot bead of blood from Dver's neck.
"No one survives a fall into the Pit," the Enforcer said softly, his killing intent flooding the narrow hallway. "So tell me, little rat... what exactly crawled out?"
The steel of the saber was freezing against Dver's throat. That single drop of blood welled up from the shallow cut, tracing a warm, morbid line down his collarbone.
"I asked you a question, rat," the lead Enforcer repeated, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper. "What crawled out of the Pit?"
Dver forced his heart to pound like a frantic war drum. He hitched his breathing, making it painfully shallow and ragged. Tears streamed freely down his dirt-streaked face, mixing with the drying gore. He didn't just look like a terrified sixteen-year-old boy; he became one.
"I—I didn't fall!" Dver choked out, his voice cracking with pitch-perfect desperation. He scrambled backward, scraping his palms against the rough stone floor as if desperate to put distance between himself and the blade. "I swear! I caught the ledge! I was hiding just below the grating!"
The female Enforcer sneered, her lantern casting long, distorted shadows across Dver's pathetic display. "He's lying. Look at the blood on him."
"It's not mine!" Dver shrieked, wrapping his arms around his head in a protective cower. "Someone threw a body down! It hit me on the way! Please, I just want to go back to my quarters! I won't tell anyone I was here!"
Inside Dver's mind, a dark, rumbling laughter echoed.
"Look at them," the Void God whispered, its voice dripping with ancient malice. "Three specks of dust, holding a piece of sharp metal to the throat of an abyss. Bite his hand off, Vessel. Let me taste his meridian channels."
Quiet, Dver commanded silently. Patience is how we eat the whole sect.
The lead Enforcer stared at the shivering boy for a long, suffocating moment. He expanded his spiritual sense one last time, violently probing Dver's internal core.
Dver held his breath. He kept the suffocating mass of the Void compressed so tightly it felt like his internal organs were going to rupture. All the Enforcer felt was the weak, leaky, rank-98,412 cultivation of an untalented Outer Court piece of trash.
The Enforcer scoffed, finally lowering his saber.
"Pathetic," he spat. "Just another outer court roach. If you had actually fallen into the dark, the miasma would have stripped the flesh from your bones in seconds."
He kicked Dver sharply in the ribs. Dver let out a breathless yelp, allowing the momentum to roll him across the stone floor.
"Get out of here. If I catch you near the forbidden grounds again, I'll throw you into the Pit myself."
"Y-yes! Thank you, Senior!" Dver scrambled to his feet, bowing so deeply his forehead nearly touched his knees.
He didn't run. Running required hidden stamina. Instead, he stumbled, limping heavily on his left leg, playing the part of a broken, beaten dog until he finally rounded the corner and disappeared into the sprawling labyrinth of the Outer Sect.
The moment he was out of sight, the tears stopped.
Dver's posture shifted. The cowering, trembling boy vanished, instantly replaced by a cold, predatory stillness. He wiped the dried tears from his cheeks, his dead eyes scanning his new hunting ground.
The Outer Sect was a sprawling slum built into the lower slopes of the Blood Lotus Mountain. Row upon row of dilapidated wooden shacks were crammed together beneath the oppressive shadow of the Inner Sect's pristine, floating peaks. The air here was thin, reeking of sweat, cheap incense, and desperation. Thousands of low-level cultivators lived here, fighting like stray dogs for scraps of cultivation resources.
To anyone else, it was hell. To Dver, it was a buffet.
But as he took his first step toward the disciple barracks, his vision suddenly blurred. A white-hot spike of agony drove itself through his chest. Dver staggered into a dark, narrow alleyway, bracing his hand against the damp brick wall as he violently coughed up a mouthful of black blood.
"Your body is failing," the Void God noted, sounding entirely unconcerned. "The boy's body you stole is too weak to contain my essence. It is cracking under the pressure. You need to repair it."
Dver wiped his mouth, his chest heaving. The hunger wasn't just a sensation; it was a physical tearing in his soul. The Void inside him demanded to be fed. He needed Qi. He needed lifeforce. And he needed it tonight, or he would die before the sun came up.
He leaned against the damp wall, calculating. He couldn't just kill anyone. If he drained a disciple with powerful backing, it would draw an Enforcer investigation. He needed someone invisible. Someone whose disappearance would be chalked up to the everyday brutality of the Outer Sect.
"Well, well, well..."
A cruel voice drifted from the mouth of the alley.
Dver slowly turned his head.
Blocking the exit were two young men wearing the same grey robes as him, though theirs were clean and pressed. The one in the front, a bulky youth with a sneer and a thick scar over his left eyebrow, casually cracked his knuckles.
"I thought I told you to go jump off the Weeping Cliff, Dver," the bulky youth said, stepping into the dim alleyway. "I told you that if I saw your face in the barracks again, I'd cripple your cultivation completely. Or did you forget our little arrangement?"
Dver looked at the bulky youth. Then, he looked at his companion.
No witnesses. Low cultivation. Aggressive enough that their disappearance would just look like they picked a fight with the wrong beast in the woods.
"Ah," the Void God purred in his mind. "Delivery."
Dver didn't smile, but a cold, heavy shadow seemed to bleed into the alleyway, dimming the moonlight. He let his shoulders slump, dropping his head as if in complete, utter despair.
"I remember," Dver whispered, his voice trembling perfectly. "Please... just follow me to the back of the alley. I have spirit stones hidden in the loose bricks. I'll give you everything."
The bulky youth laughed, motioning for his friend to follow. "Smart rat. Lead the way."
They walked into the dark.