Yuan Zhi was dragged underground.
Not walked. Not escorted. Dragged.
Two masked inner sect guards gripped his arms like meat, yanking him through a tunnel carved from black roots and slick bone. There were no torches. No light. The walls pulsed faintly, like the inside of something alive. His boots scraped against twisted stone. The air stank of rot and cold metal.
Behind him, the spiral stairs vanished into the dark.
In front—something ancient waited.
They didn't speak to him. They didn't need to.
Every Black Rain disciple knew the path by its silence.
This was not a reward.
This was the Rite of Severance.
The final test before ascension. The boundary between a pawn and something… else.
He didn't ask questions. But he memorized everything.
The way the corridor sloped downward like a gullet. The subtle markings carved into the flesh-wall — tally marks, warnings, names long since scratched away. Someone had died here. Hundreds had.
The root-tunnel opened.
A chamber.
Round. Vaulted. Pulsing.
At the center stood a raised platform — carved from fused bone and obsidian. It looked like an altar. Like a throne. Like a butcher's slab. All at once.
Above it, suspended in midair, hung an object.
A massive obsidian ring — rotating slowly, silently.
In its center burned a violet flame. Cold. Furious. Whispering.
Even from meters away, Yuan Zhi felt it scratch at his thoughts.
The guards released him.
A voice echoed from above.
"Approach."
He stepped forward alone.
From the shadows behind the ring, three elders emerged.
Each wore the ceremonial robes of the Inner Core — black with silver inlays shaped like severed chains. None of them had faces. Their masks were sculpted from old bone, and their hands glowed faintly with spirit seal runes.
The middle elder spoke.
"The Rite of Severance begins."
"You are Yuan Zhi. No clan. No record. No system. A stray."
"You have survived the Bone Trial, passed the Blood Feast, aligned your soul with the forbidden path of Devouring Shadow…"
"…and now you stand here. Before the Gate of Undoing."
The floating ring pulsed behind them.
"Do you understand what you must give?"
Yuan Zhi did not speak.
The left elder continued. "To ascend further, your mind must be made hollow. Your attachments… cut. The ghosts within you… exorcised."
"You must choose one memory."
"Only one."
"To be taken. Severed. Ripped from your soul."
They stepped aside.
"The flame will do the rest."
He stared at the flame.
It did not flicker like normal fire. It moved like a serpent. Like thought. Hungry and aware.
It stared back.
Yuan Zhi stepped onto the altar.
His mind reeled.
Visions swarmed him. Not illusions. Options.
The flame offered him three memories.
Each one suspended before him like shards of glass. Transparent but real. He could see the images moving within.
1.His last moment before transmigration — lying cold in a steel hospital bed, with machines beeping and lungs failing, staring at a ceiling stained with mold. The feeling of being forgotten by the world.
2.The first time he killed a child for bread in the outer slums — his hands trembling, a broken bottle in his grip, the shallow breathing of the boy fading in the dirt as he took the food and ran.
3.Feng Lian's screaming face — the exact moment he shattered her jaw and drove her into the mud, the fear in her eyes twisting into hatred.
Three memories. Three ghosts.
Only one could be severed.
He stood there for a long time.
The flame waited. Patient. Timeless.
His heart beat slowly.
He did not feel fear. He felt weight.
Which piece of himself could he live without?
To forget the pain of death?
To erase the cruelty of his rise?
To bury the vengeance he'd earned?
None of them were painless. None were safe.
Then he chose.
Not with hesitation.
With intention.
He reached toward the memory of the hospital ceiling.
His death.
The flame surged forward — and swallowed it whole.
For a second, he didn't feel anything.
Then the scream tore from his throat. It wasn't just pain — it was void.Something was ripped from him that had no name. His entire body seized. His shadow shrieked beneath him. The altar pulsed, the chamber groaned, and the flame stabbed deep into his soul.
He collapsed.
Shaking. Breathless.
And when he rose—
He couldn't remember dying.
He couldn't remember Earth.
It was gone.
The shame. The origin. The weakness of a dying world. The fear of that ceiling. The abandonment. The pain of a body failing alone.
All of it — erased.
He opened his eyes. The elders stared.
One spoke.
"You severed your origin."
Another murmured, "No ties to your old world remain. Your soul is fully this one's now."
The central elder stepped forward and placed his hand against Yuan Zhi's chest.
A mark burned into him — a severed ring surrounding a violet dot.
"You are no longer a visitor."
"You belong to this realm now."
"Let it feed you. Or let it consume you."
Yuan Zhi turned away without speaking.
Yuan Zhi walked back up the tunnel with no memory of the world he came from.
No Earth. No ceiling. No origin.
Only silence.
Each step was heavier than the last. Not from pain — but weightlessness. The kind that comes when a soul is no longer tethered to anything it can call real.
His mind… was a hollow room. The echo of his own breath startled him.
He touched the mark burned into his chest.
A severed ring. A violet dot.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
The sect should have felt familiar. But it didn't.
The walls whispered.
The ground pulsed.
The sky above the stone ridges was just black canvas — no stars. No moon. Just a void painted by divine cruelty.
He wandered into his assigned cave, sat cross-legged on cold stone, and stared into nothing.
Time passed.
He didn't meditate. Didn't train.
He just listened.
A voice arrived with no footsteps.
"You should've died in the Rite."
Yuan Zhi didn't turn.
He already knew someone was there. The shadow bending wrong at the corner of the wall told him.
The voice was venomous, young.
"I was supposed to be next. I waited five months for that spot."
"I bribed my elder. Prepared the spirit ink. Practiced the incantations."
"You — a nameless stray — just walked in and took it."
"Now your name's being whispered in the halls."
"That should've been me."
The figure stepped into view.
A tall boy with a carved jawline, high inner-disciple robes, and golden thread trim — meaning direct bloodline. His eyes glowed faintly red. Twin daggers rested at his hips, both inscribed with flame runes.
"Do you even know who I am?" he hissed.
Yuan Zhi stared at him.
"You're someone who thinks names matter."
The boy snarled.
He drew both daggers in a blink — and lunged.
No hesitation. No feint. Just rage.
A flicker of light. A killing blow.
But Yuan Zhi didn't dodge.
He stepped into the strike.
The dagger sank into his shoulder.
Not the throat. Not the heart.
Yuan Zhi grabbed the boy's wrist — and smiled.
A true smile. The first in this world.
"You're weaker than your robes."
He twisted. The bone cracked.
The second dagger never came. The boy screamed. His hand went limp.
Yuan Zhi stepped forward — impaling himself deeper onto the blade still lodged in him — and headbutted him.
Once. Twice.
Skull on skull.
The boy crumpled.
Blood spilled from his forehead.
Yuan Zhi knelt beside him and whispered:
"Do you want your memory erased, too?"
The boy choked.
"You— you're mad."
Yuan Zhi's hand pressed over the boy's mouth. Not to silence.
To steal. His palm pulsed with black light.
The mark on his chest glowed.
From his hand — shadow threads slithered into the disciple's face.
And pulled.
The boy's scream never reached the air.
Because it got ripped out first.
Yuan Zhi felt it.
A thought. A memory fragment.
Of a younger version of the boy. A sister. Laughing. Holding a carved bird.
A simple moment. Gone.
The boy convulsed. Foam spilled from his lips. His eyes rolled white.
Yuan Zhi stood.
He didn't feel stronger.
He didn't feel anything.
But his shadow moved on its own, licking the blood, storing the stolen fragment like candy.
He left the body where it fell.
A day later, he was summoned again. This time not to the Rite. But to something worse.
Vault of Living Scrolls
No one walked here.
It was not part of the sect's map. Most disciples didn't know it existed.
It was a gate sealed with living flesh — a breathing wall of script and runes, shaped like an enormous stretched skin covered in blinking eyes and ink-tongues.
A female elder greeted him. No mask. Just a veil soaked in dried qi-blood.
She looked… human. But her hands were wrapped in scrolls that moved when she did.
"You've severed your past," she said.
"You've stolen your first soul-thread."
"You're ready for your first scripture."
Yuan Zhi narrowed his eyes. "Scripture?"
She stepped aside.
The flesh gate opened — revealing a single chamber with one scroll suspended in chains.
Not paper. Skin.
Stitched from hundreds of disciples who had failed this trial.
Each section bore a fragment of a cultivation technique. Written not in ink — but in their blood, frozen at the moment of death.
The elder nodded toward it.
"This is the first scripture of the Devouring Shadow Path."
"You don't read it."
"You survive it."
Yuan Zhi stepped inside.
The gate closed behind him. The scroll pulsed.
A voice rose from its stitching.
"The shadow must eat."
"The flesh must remember."
"The soul must break before it bends."
It screamed.
Not from fear.
From hunger.
Yuan Zhi smiled for the second time.
He reached forward.
The moment Yuan Zhi touched the stitched scroll of skin, the room vanished.
No sensation. No light. No sound.
Only the sensation of falling inward — into himself.
A spiral of shadows twisted around his limbs, wrapping tighter with every heartbeat. Voices echoed from every direction. Not in language. In instinct. Emotion. Starvation.
Then came the pain.
But it was not physical.
The scroll had entered his mind.
He stood in a mirrored world.
Grey stone. No sky. Just an endless reflection of himself in every direction.
Except none of them were right.
One Yuan Zhi cried and begged for mercy, his knees raw.
Another was bloated from indulgence, his eyes dull and distant.
One still clung to the memory of Earth — holding a photograph of people he no longer knew.
And in the center—
A child version of him.
Tiny. Frail. Wide-eyed.
The scroll's voice echoed through the mirrored void:
"Choose the false self."
"Break it."
"Feed it to the shadow, or be devoured by it."
Yuan Zhi walked toward the child first.
The child flinched.
"W-We don't have to be like this," it said. "We could've waited. Played it safe. Learned slowly—"
He crushed its throat.
Not with anger.
With indifference.
The neck cracked. The body vanished.
The void hissed in approval.
"Two more remain."
The Yuan Zhi holding the photograph stepped forward.
"I still remember her name," he whispered. "Our sister. The hospital nurse who gave us that candy."
"You forgot her."
"You let the flame take her."
Yuan Zhi didn't argue.
He pulled the memory from the reflection's mind — a shimmering thread of light.
And fed it to his shadow.
The image burned.
That Yuan Zhi collapsed, screaming.
The shadow fed.
The final reflection — the bloated one — tried to run.
Too slow.
Yuan Zhi caught it and pinned it.
It sobbed. "I just wanted peace."
He dug his fingers into its eyes.
"Then rest."
He tore it open.
The reflection shattered into dust.
The mirrors cracked.
The void trembled. Yuan Zhi stood alone.
A ring of black flames circled his feet.
A sigil appeared beneath him — an ancient one shaped like a maw devouring the sun.
The scroll's voice returned.
"You have devoured your echoes."
"Now the scripture devours you."
Pain tore through him. His veins turned black. His skin split and bled violet mist.
The scripture seared its words into his bones — not just ideas, but commands.
He screamed, but not from resistance.
From acceptance.
The Devouring Shadow Path was not a technique.
It was a hunger written into the soul.
And now it had a body.
His.
[You have unlocked: Scripture of the First Maw]
"Let the shadow feast upon memory, essence, and soul.
Let the body learn through loss, not teaching.
Progress is not earned. It is taken."
Yuan Zhi collapsed to one knee.
Smoke poured from his back. His shadow now moved before he did — crawling, twitching, anticipating blood.
His breath was fire.
His mind—clear.
No illusions. No softness.
He had no master.
No system.
No fate.
A voice clapped slowly behind him. He turned.
A new figure stood outside the chamber.
A woman.
Long silver robes. Crimson veil. Black rain cloud sigil on her palms.
"You're progressing faster than expected," she said.
Yuan Zhi didn't respond. She tilted her head.
"Do you know what you truly severed in the Rite?"
He narrowed his eyes.
She smiled.
"You didn't just erase your past. You severed your right to reincarnate."
"If you die now… your soul has no return point."
"You'll be devoured by the void itself."
Silence.
Then she leaned closer.
"And yet… you smile."
He did.
Barely. A fraction. But it was there.
Because something inside him enjoyed it.
"You'll be summoned to the Abyss Library soon," the woman said. "Keep your… appetite ready." She vanished in a flicker of dust.
He looked at his hands.
Stained with false blood. Marked by scripture. Guided by nothing but desire.
He clenched them tight.
"Good."
"No more past."
"No more chains."
"Now I climb."