Chapter Sixteen - The Boy of the Abyss
At the farthest edge of the world lies the Abyss—a land where the earth itself seems broken, as if the heavens once hurled it down in anger. Mountains stand like jagged teeth, rivers run thick with ash, and forests of stone claw upward, black and lightless. No kingdom claims these lands; no law restrains the cruelty within. In the Abyss, only one truth is honored: the weak are meat, and the strong their knife.
Here, men are little better than beasts. They huddle in caves and ruins, fighting with the same feral hunger as the creatures that stalk them. Life is not granted; it is stolen, day after day, breath by breath.
Amid this wilderness of despair, a child grew.
He was nameless, for there was no one to name him. He was heir to nothing, for there was nothing to inherit. His first lessons were hunger and pain, his only companions the shadows that circled his meager fire. Yet he endured.
The boy's hands learned to carve stone into blades and bind sinew into snares. He studied the beasts of the Abyss, learning how they hunted, how they killed, how they survived. And slowly—without teacher, without scripture—his body began to change. His limbs grew hard with labor, his strikes heavy with purpose. His breath deepened, filling his chest like the bellows of a forge. Unknowingly, he was gathering the essence of a Strength Refinement Initiate, the first pillar of the martial path.
But he did not yet know it.
That knowledge came on the day the sky darkened with wings.
The cry of the Nether Crows was a sound like tearing iron—harsh, grating, merciless. They descended in a storm, feathers slick with shadow, eyes burning with hunger. The air itself seemed to recoil from their coming.
The boy did not run. He could not.
He stood with his crude blade in hand, and when the storm fell upon him, he moved as he had lived—without hesitation. His arms rose and fell with the precision of instinct honed through countless battles for scraps of food. His feet shifted with balance carved by hardship. Each blow he struck carried the full weight of his frame, every ounce of strength summoned and spent without waste.
The crows screamed and fell. Shadows split apart. Blood spattered the earth.
When the last body twitched its final convulsion, silence returned. The boy stood trembling, his chest heaving, his weapon shattered to a shard. Yet within him, something stirred—a sudden clarity, as if a hidden door had opened. His strength was no longer merely survival's brute force. It was deliberate. Sharpened. Whole.
And he understood.
This was his way out of the Abyss.
In that moment, the nameless child of the Abyss became more than prey or predator. He became a Martial Initiate.
The first step had been taken, though no path lay before him but the one he carved himself.
...….
Ten years passed in the Abyss, though years were not counted here. The sun rose and fell, the beasts hunted and were hunted, and in the endless struggle one boy had grown into a man.
He was tall, his figure raw and imposing, standing a full six and a half feet. His hair fell in wild tangles of black, untamed as the land itself. His eyes, amber and bright, carried a strange light—sharp and watchful, as though forged from fire and hunger both.
The Abyss had not broken him. It had tempered him.
Now he stood waist-deep in a pool of viscous, sulfurous mud. The liquid hissed faintly as it clung to his body, biting at his flesh with a dull, corrosive sting. To most, the pain would have been unbearable. To him, it was necessity. He endured, muscles tense but unyielding, as the acid gnawed against his skin.
The young man did not know the names of the things he practiced. He had never heard of the Flesh Refinement stage, nor of the Martial Path it belonged to. What he knew was only this: the Abyss struck without mercy, and if his skin could not withstand its fangs and claws, he would not live another season.
So he suffered the mud's bite.
When at last he pulled himself free, the air steamed off his body in pale tendrils. His skin was reddened and raw, but his gaze remained steady. From a pouch of beast hide, he took a thick, dark paste—ground from bitter roots and the marrow of creatures he had slain—and spread it across his body. It hardened quickly into a crust, tightening, cracking, and at last flaking away.
Beneath it, his skin gleamed faintly, tougher than before.
Day after day, he repeated the ritual. Each layer of weakness sloughed off, each layer of strength revealed beneath. He did not measure progress in titles or realms, but in survival—how many strikes of claw he could endure, how many days of hunger his body could withstand, how many times he could rise after being thrown into the dirt.
Unknowingly, he was stepping into the second pillar of body refinement. His flesh, once fragile, was hardening into the flesh of a Martial Novice.
The Abyss had given him nothing, yet in its cruelty it had forged him still.