The Discipline Hall of the Outer Sect smelled of sulfur, dried blood, and centuries of unquestioned authority.
Deacon Shen sat behind a heavy ironwood desk, his thick fingers rhythmically tapping against the wood. Laid out on a woven straw mat before him was Ma Chen—completely unconscious, his face pale and slick with a cold sweat. The Pavilion Elder stood nearby, shaking his head.
"His inner thigh nerve cluster is completely pulverized," the Elder said dryly. "He will never walk straight again, let alone cultivate martial arts. He claims he tripped after aggressively pushing the Dver boy."
Shen stopped tapping his fingers. His jaw tightened, the rusted-iron color of his eyes darkening with absolute malice.
"Tripped," Shen repeated. The word tasted like ash in his mouth.
First, Zhao and Lin vanish without a trace. Then, the rat Dver cowers in the dirt before three thousand disciples, swearing he hid in the latrines all night, making Shen look like a fool for even questioning him. And now, less than four hours later, a top-500 disciple is permanently crippled by an "accident" right next to that exact same boy?
Shen wasn't stupid. Coincidences in the Blood Lotus Sect were just assassinations with flawless staging.
"That little rat," Shen snarled softly, his Qi flaring and violently cracking the stone floor beneath his heavy boots. "He played me. He hid his fangs and made me a blind laughingstock."
Shen stood up, striding over to the sprawling archive of wooden registry slips lining the back wall. He yanked open a drawer marked for the bottom-tier trash and pulled out Dver's file, unrolling the cheap parchment.
"Dver. Age sixteen. Born to a mortal branch family of iron miners in Ash-Ridge Valley, three days' ride from the mountain," Shen read aloud. A cruel, vindictive smile slowly spread across his scarred face.
For ten thousand years, the sect had built its floating peaks on the broken backs of mortals. Millions of slaves labored in the outer valleys, pulling iron and spirit stones from the dirt just to feed the Elders' ambitions. In the Blood Lotus Sect, you didn't just punish a rogue disciple. You punished their roots.
Shen tossed the scroll to a hulking Enforcer standing by the heavy oak door. "Take two men. Ride to Ash-Ridge Valley tonight. I don't care if you have to burn their miserable mining camp to the ground. Find this rat's parents, break their legs, and drag them back to the Sect. We will see how well Dver hides his fangs when I skin his mother in the courtyard."
The sun had set, painting the Outer Sect slums in suffocating shades of grey and pitch black.
Dver sat cross-legged in the center of his rotting wooden shack. The air inside the small room was thick, vibrating with a heavy, oppressive pressure. Veins the color of black ink bulged against his neck as he violently circulated the Asura's Iron-Blood Mantra.
He wasn't using ambient Qi. He was using the thick, stolen lifeforce of the two bullies he had devoured the night before, forcefully compressing it directly into his muscle fibers.
Crack. Snap.
The sound of his own bones fracturing and immediately healing denser echoed in the quiet room. It was excruciating, but Dver's face remained a mask of dead, emotionless stone. He had survived the pit; physical pain was just data to him now.
But suddenly, his body seized. A violent tremor wracked his spine, and Dver coughed up a splatter of black blood.
"Your shell grows harder, Dver," the Void God hummed in his mind, its ancient voice vibrating with dark amusement. "But it has reached its mortal limit. If you devour another cultivator's Qi right now, this frail skin will burst like overripe fruit. To break through to the next realm, you must temper this vessel with the blood of ancient beasts, or the marrow of the earth itself."
Dver wiped the blood from his chin, his breathing ragged but controlled. A bottleneck, he realized coldly. I hold the power of the abyss, but this body is made of brittle glass. I need resources to temper it.
"Soon," Dver whispered, exhaling a breath of dark, freezing air that instantly frosted the wooden floorboards.
Suddenly, Dver's eyes snapped open.
He didn't hear a sound, but the Void inside him was highly attuned to killing intent. It was like a drop of blood hitting a shark's snout in pitch-black water. Someone in the Outer Sect was radiating pure malice directed entirely at the name 'Dver.'
He stood up, his lazy, slouched posture returning as he stepped out of his shack and melted seamlessly into the shadows of the alleyway. He navigated the rooftops of the slums with the silent, explosive grace of a hunting cat, tracking the source of the intent toward the Discipline Hall.
He perched on the edge of a slanted roof, blending perfectly with a stone gargoyle, and looked down at the courtyard.
Three men wearing the black and crimson robes of Shen's personal Enforcers were saddling armored terror-horses. Dver focused his newly heightened senses, catching the tail-end of their conversation over the howling mountain wind.
"...three days' ride to Ash-Ridge," the scarred leader grunted, securing a spiked whip to his saddle. "Deacon Shen wants the family alive, but he didn't say they had to be in one piece. Let's move."
Up on the roof, Dver's empty eyes went completely still.
Ash-Ridge. The family of the dead boy.
"Ash-Ridge Valley,"the Void God mused, a dark nostalgia bleeding into its tone. "Ten thousand years ago, that valley was a river of blood where your First Patriarch slaughtered the Iron-Fleshed giants. Now, it is merely a quarry for mortal slaves."
Dver didn't care about the original Dver's family, nor the history of the giants. To him, the family were just strangers. But if Shen dragged them here, the very first thing they would do upon seeing him is scream, 'That is not our son!' His stolen identity would shatter. The Elders would realize an impostor had infiltrated the sect. They would scan him with high-level artifacts, discover the Void God, and bring the full, crushing weight of the Blood Lotus Sect down on his head before he was strong enough to eat them.
"A loose thread," the Void God whispered, a dark thrill dripping from the words. "They seek to pull it."
"Then we cut the thread," Dver replied.
He watched the three Enforcers ride out of the sect's massive iron gates, plunging down the mountain path into the dense, treacherous Blackwood Forest.
Dver didn't bother packing a weapon. He simply stepped off the roof, his body dropping thirty feet into the shadows below, making absolutely no sound as he landed.
The game had changed. He wasn't just hunting for food anymore. He was hunting to protect his lie. And out there, in the dark woods, away from the prying eyes of the Elders... he didn't have to pretend to be weak.
Out there, he could let the Void off its leash.
Tracking three armored terror-horses through the Blackwood Forest wasn't difficult. The massive beasts left deep, churning tracks in the wet earth, and the Enforcers rode with the arrogant, noisy carelessness of men who believed they were at the absolute top of the food chain.
They were wrong.
For three days, Dver trailed them through the canopy like a ghost. He didn't rush. He didn't push his body to exhaustion. He simply maintained a steady, calculated pace through the treetops, using the stolen Qi in his veins to mask his presence entirely. He spent the travel time perfectly integrating the Asura's Iron-Blood Mantra into his muscles, violently breaking down and rebuilding his own fibers. He was tempering his fragile mortal bottleneck, ensuring his physical body would be dense enough to survive the feast that was to come.
On the evening of the third day, the dense canopy of the Blackwood broke, revealing the soot-stained depression of Ash-Ridge Valley.
It wasn't a town; it was a miserable, sprawling tomb. Thousands of rickety wooden shacks clung like parasites to the sides of a massive, open-pit iron mine. The air tasted heavily of rust, cheap coal, and generation upon generation of unbroken exhaustion. This was the true foundation of the Blood Lotus Sect—a grinder that chewed up mortal slaves to spit out spirit stones and raw ore for the floating peaks above.
Dver crouched on the thick branch of a dead, lightning-struck oak tree overlooking the camp. His face was an emotionless mask, his eyes completely flat as he looked down at the mud-slicked streets.
Below him, the three Enforcers rode directly into the center of the camp. They didn't announce themselves. The scarred leader simply drew his spiked whip and lashed it out, wrapping it around the throat of a passing miner and brutally yanking him down into the freezing mud.
"The family of the boy named Dver," the Enforcer barked, his voice laced with a suffocating wave of Qi that made the surrounding mortals collapse to their knees in sheer terror. "Where is their hovel?"
The terrified miner, gagging on blood and mud, pointed a trembling, soot-stained finger toward a dilapidated shack teetering at the very edge of the mining pit.
Dver watched from the branches. He didn't move a single muscle.
"They are about to sever your only loose thread for you," the Void God purred in his mind, its ancient voice vibrating with dark, genuine amusement. "Most humans would feel a sickening knot in their chest right now. Pity. Guilt. Do you feel anything, Dver?"
"No" Dver replied simply.
Down in the mud, the three Enforcers kicked the wooden door of the shack cleanly off its rusted hinges. Two figures were violently dragged out into the freezing rain—a frail, soot-covered man and a weeping woman. The biological parents of the boy whose skin Dver was currently wearing.
"By order of Deacon Shen, you are coming with us," the scarred leader sneered, slowly dismounting his armored horse. "Your rat of a son has offended the Discipline Hall."
"Our son?" The frail man coughed, his sunken eyes wide with utter confusion and terror. "No, my lords, please! There must be a mistake! Dver... Dver sent us a letter two weeks ago. He said he failed the outer court exam... he said he was being sent down to the deeper mines..."
Up in the tree, Dver's eyes narrowed a fraction of an inch. Ah. The original Dver had known he was going to be assassinated. The boy had lied to his parents to spare them the false hope of him surviving. It was a pathetic, sentimental gesture.
The scarred Enforcer didn't care about the story. "Shut your mouth, mortal."
He kicked the father brutally in the ribs. The sickening crack of shattering bones echoed over the silent camp.
The mother screamed, throwing herself over her husband's broken body. "Please! Take me! Leave him, he has the lung-rot! He won't survive the journey to the mountain!"
The Enforcers just laughed. The scarred leader raised his iron-booted foot, casually placing it directly on the father's throat. He pressed down.
Dver watched from above. He saw the father's face turn a bruised, suffocating purple. He heard the mother's agonizing screams tear through the rain. He watched as the life was slowly, methodically crushed out of the only two people in the world who could identify him as a fake.
He didn't blink. His heart rate didn't elevate a single beat. He just watched the problem solve itself.
With a final, wet crunch, the father's neck snapped. The mother let out a sound so utterly broken it made the surrounding miners cover their ears. Driven by absolute, blind grief, she scrambled backward, grabbed a rusted mining pick from the mud, and swung it wildly at the Enforcer's leg.
It harmlessly bounced off his Qi-reinforced skin.
The Enforcer sighed, utterly annoyed by the inconvenience. With a casual flick of his wrist, his spiked whip lashed out, taking the woman's head cleanly off her shoulders. Her body collapsed into the mud beside her husband, her blood mixing with the coal dust.
The camp was dead silent, save for the steady patter of the rain.
"Idiot," one of the other Enforcers grunted, looking down at the two corpses. "Deacon Shen said to bring them back alive. He wanted to skin them in front of the boy."
"They resisted," the scarred leader spat, wiping the blood and rain from his whip. "We'll just cut off their heads and bring those back. Shen can throw them at the rat's feet. It will send the exact same message."
The leader drew his hunting knife and knelt in the mud next to the bodies to begin his work.
That was Dver's cue. The loose ends were dead. Now, it was time to eat.
Dver simply let himself fall from the branch. He plummeted thirty feet, landing directly behind the two standing Enforcers without making a single sound. The rain seemed to curve around him, actively avoiding his skin as the heavy, suffocating aura of the Void began to leak from his pores.
"Feast," the Void God hissed.
Dver raised both his hands.
The shadows cast by the Enforcers' spiritual lanterns suddenly turned pitch black, rising from the mud like a tidal wave of living, viscous tar. Before the two standing Enforcers could even turn around, the Void crashed over them.
There was no fight. There was only erasure.
The scarred leader, still kneeling by the corpses, froze. He heard the sudden, terrifying silence behind him. He spun around, his hunting knife raised.
His two men were gone. The horses were gone.
And standing in the freezing rain, looking at him with eyes that contained the absolute, crushing emptiness of a dead universe, was a sixteen-year-old boy in ragged grey robes.
"You..." the leader breathed, his aura flaring as his Qi instantly locked onto the boy's face. He recognized the description from the files. "You're Dver. What... what did you just do?"
Dver tilted his head, his face entirely unreadable. He stepped slowly over the headless corpse of his 'mother.' He didn't even look down at it.
"You failed your mission," Dver said, his voice a flat, dead whisper that somehow cut through the howling rain. "Shen wanted them alive. Now, he's going to be very disappointed in you."
The Enforcer's eyes widened in pure horror as the boy's shadow suddenly expanded, rushing across the blood-soaked mud to swallow his heavy iron boots.
He roared, violently detonating his Foundation Establishment aura. The freezing rain turned to steam as a localized hurricane of crimson Qi erupted from his pores—a force that could easily crush a mortal town into gravel.
But the shadows didn't burn away. They drank the crimson Qi like a starving hound lapping up spilled blood.
"What are you?!" the leader choked out. He tried to swing his hunting knife, but the darkness had already slithered up his legs, plunging directly through his flesh without leaving a mark. It bypassed his physical nerves entirely and sank its jagged, freezing hooks straight into his Dantian—the spiritual core he had spent forty years of agonizing meditation to build.
Dver stepped closer, his boots splashing softly in the mix of cold mud and his 'parents'' blood. He looked into the man's terrified, bulging eyes with an expression of absolute, unblinking emptiness.
"A mid-tier Foundation core," Dver murmured, his voice a flat, clinical whisper. "Forty years of stealing from mortals. Forty years of hoarding spirit stones pulled from this very pit."
Dver raised a single finger.
Inside the Enforcer's body, the shadows violently clenched.
"AGGHHH!" The man shrieked, a sound so utterly broken it made the corpses in the mud seem peaceful. He collapsed to his knees, clawing frantically at his own stomach.
The Void wasn't eating his flesh yet. It was eating his cultivation. Strand by agonizing strand, the shadows were ripping his meridians out of his spiritual roots, pulling them like loose threads from a tapestry. The Enforcer felt decades of power, his entire identity, being chewed up and swallowed by the boy standing in front of him.
"Stop... please!" The arrogant, untouchable Enforcer was completely gone. He was weeping, slamming his forehead into the bloody mud exactly where the frail father had died moments ago. "Take my spatial ring! Take my life-slip! I swear a blood oath to serve you! Please, don't cripple me!"
Dver didn't even blink. He just watched the man beg, silently evaluating the quality of the Qi flowing into his own palm.
"You misunderstand," Dver murmured, his voice completely flat. "Oaths require a soul. You won't have one in a few seconds."
"Unravel the soul," the Void God commanded, its voice carrying the terrifying indifference of a dying star. "Leave nothing for the cycle of rebirth."
Dver closed his fist.
The shadows ripped the Enforcer's Dantian entirely to shreds, but they didn't stop there. They latched onto the man's very soul. In the Blood Lotus Sect, death was just a transition—Elders could reincarnate, and ghosts could be forged into demonic weapons.
But the Void offered no afterlife.
The Enforcer's screams reached a pitch that mortals couldn't even hear as his soul was actively dissolved into absolute nothingness. He was forced to watch, in excruciating, agonizing slow-motion, as his physical flesh began to flake away like black ash, starting from his legs and crawling up his torso.
He felt every single cell die. He felt his existence being permanently erased from the reincarnation cycle.
Dver stood over him, his face an unblinking, emotionless mask., simply waiting for the screaming to stop so he could begin the walk back to the sect.
When the shadows finally receded, there was no blood. There was no body. There wasn't even an echo. Just the cold rain falling on the empty mud.