Zhang Bao ran. His feet slapped against the frozen ground of the narrow alleys, a panicked rhythm clashing with the deathly silence enveloping Brook District. His breath came in ragged gasps, each inhalation feeling like sucking in shards of glass. The pain in his shoulder, where the man had gripped him, throbbed with its own rhythm, a deep and terrible burning, as if his bone were being stained with rust.
He didn't think to seek help. His newly awakened animal instinct knew there was no help to be found. Every door he passed was sealed shut. Every window was dark. Everyone who could help lay cold on the ground. He was the last one. A mistake in a ritual he didn't understand.
Finally, his legs gave out. He stumbled and fell headlong into a narrow crevice between two storage sheds, tumbling onto a pile of dusty, rotten grain sacks. He lay there, trembling violently, trying to swallow the panic threatening to overwhelm his mind.
He closed his eyes, and all he saw were them. His father's face frozen in terror. His mother's outstretched hand. His little sister's small cloth doll dropped on the floor.
A choked groan escaped his lips. He curled up, drawing his knees to his chest as if he could keep himself from shattering into pieces. The emotional pain was so immense, so physical, that it momentarily overpowered burn in his shoulder.
And then, something shifted.
It was a strange sensation inside him. Like a flow of murky water moving through his veins, following the frantic beat of his pulse. It was the energy he had absorbed, the energy of death and offering. During his flight, it had lain dormant, settling. Now, catalyzed by total despair and crippling pain, it began to work.
It converged on his wounded shoulder.
Zhang Bao screamed aloud, the sound muffled by the grain sacks. It felt like a red-hot iron being driven into his wound, twisting and searing his flesh from the inside. He could feel the dark energy digging in, infiltrating every muscle fiber, every nerve ending, binding them together in an unnatural way.
His vision swam. The world around him faded, replaced by a horrifying internal panorama of sensation. He saw—not with his eyes, but with a newly awakened inner perception—the faint light of severed lives, trapped within the ritual space. He heard the echoes of their final screams, the whispers of their fear. It was all sucked into him, forced through the point of pain in his shoulder, and processed into something else. Something hard. Something cold.
This was not noble cultivation. This was not peaceful meditation to align with nature. This was spiritual cannibalism. It was forcing the foundation of one's power using bricks made from the pain of others.
The process was brutal and merciless. Every wave of assimilated energy carried with it fragments of foreign emotions—a child's fear, a father's rage, a mother's despair. These fragments stabbed into Zhang Bao's consciousness like needles, threatening to tear his own soul apart.
He bit his lip until it bled, holding back another scream. His tears flowed freely, wetting the dust on the ground. This was a baptism by hellfire, and its only fuel was the memories of his loved ones.
He didn't know how long he lay there, shivering and sweating. But gradually, the sharpest edges of the pain began to recede. The burning in his shoulder changed from a raging fire to a sharp, steady coldness, like a blade of steel grafted to his bone.
The chaotic energy within him began to settle, finding a crude pattern. Instead of a swirling mist, it now felt like a turbid, rushing river, swirling around a newly formed cold core at his center, just below his breastbone. It was a foundation. Dirty, unstable, and built upon a graveyard, but it was a foundation.
He had unknowingly consolidated his power. He was no longer a shaky Initiate-Level Apprentice Knight.
He was now at the Middle Level.
The change was subtle yet monumental. His eyesight, even in the dark, became sharper. He could see the wood grain on the shed wall. His hearing picked up the squeak of a rat from afar and the whisper of the night wind. His body, still bruised and wounded, felt denser, more connected. The pain was still there, but it now felt like something manageable, something to be used.
He pushed himself to sit up, leaning against the cold wall. His breathing was still heavy, but more controlled. His eyes, red and swollen from crying, now stared into the darkness with a terrifying clarity. The crippling grief had not vanished. It was still there, a black hole in his chest. But now the hole was lined with ice. Ice made from the power he despised yet desperately needed.
He looked down the alley, towards his home district, now a mass grave. He no longer saw houses. He saw the place where everything was taken from him. He saw the place where everything was given to him.
The two robed men had wanted to use him as experimental material. They had called him "dregs". They saw the power he had just gained as something "disgusting".
A new emotion began to sprout alongside his sorrow and pain. Cold. Sharp. Clear.
Rage.
Not explosive anger, but a smoldering, silent, and deadly rage, like ice freezing over a dark lake.
They had taken everything from him. They would not take the one thing he had left, no matter how vile it was.
He stood up, his body aching but unsteady. He glanced at his shoulder. Through the tear in his shirt, he could see the skin where the man had gripped him. It wasn't a normal bruise. It was a blackish-purple color, with a cracked pattern like marble, as if his flesh had turned into a strange stone. It no longer hurt. It just felt... dead. And hard.
He held out his fingers and stared at them. He concentrated, calling upon the flow of turbid energy within him, forcing it to channel to his fingertips. It felt awkward and forced, like trying to move a muscle he'd never used before.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then, the tip of his index finger emitted a wisp of thick, grey mist. It smelled of iron and graves. The mist touched the wooden shed wall and hissed softly, leaving a dark, rotting stain on the surface.
Zhang Bao gasped, pulling his energy back. His heart pounded, not from fear, but from a horrifying recognition.
This was his power now. Power born from death. The power to corrupt, to decay.
He clenched his fist, looking down the empty alley. He had a purpose now. A simple, terrible purpose.
He would find them. Those who did this. The Sect. The worshippers. Whatever they were called.
He would use the disgusting gift they had given him to repay them. Until his blood debt was settled.
He took his first step out of the hiding place, leaving the alley's shadows behind. He was no longer running. He was walking, his steps slow and deliberate, a newborn Apprentice Knight walking among the dead, heading down a darker path.