The Black Wilderness.
That was the name the common folk dared to whisper. In truth, it had no single name. Every generation gave it a different one, as if the land itself demanded reinvention, as if calling it by the same name twice would draw its gaze.
Some called it the Silent Forest.
Others, the Hollow Grave.
In the forgotten tongues of dead sects, it was recorded as the Abyss Without Walls.
But to those who lived nearest its borders, it was simply the Forbidden.
Even from afar, the land seemed wrong. Where other forests swayed with the seasons, the Black Wilderness stood still. The trees, crooked and leafless, clawed upward like skeletal fingers frozen mid-reach. The soil was cracked and black, as though it had been scorched by a fire that never died. Rivers flowed into its heart, yet no river was ever seen leaving.
Beasts who wandered too near its boundary never came back. Birds never circled above its canopy. The wind carried no scents of grass, no chirps of insects—only silence.
Children born in the border villages were warned before they could even walk:
Never speak its name under the moonlight.
Never whistle near its borders, or the shadows will hear you.
And above all—never enter. For none who enter will return.
Mothers told their children tales by the hearth: stories of travelers swallowed whole by darkness, of hunters whose footsteps led into the wilderness but whose shadows never followed. Elders kept old rituals alive—lighting lanterns during harvest, scattering salt across doorways, murmuring chants from a time even they no longer remembered.
And yet, none of it mattered. No prayer, no charm, no sacrifice had ever tamed the Black Wilderness.
For it was not wrath that made the land what it was.
It was hunger.
Legends told of immortals who had once challenged that hunger. Mighty sects marched with banners of fire and sword, talismans blazing bright enough to blind the heavens. They boasted they would cleanse the land and claim its secrets. None returned. Their bones, if they still existed, lay hidden beneath the suffocating soil.
A thousand years later, an emperor built a road toward the Forbidden, declaring he would turn it into fertile land for his people. The road ended at the border, broken and crumbled, as though swallowed mid-construction. Of the emperor's army, not even ashes were found.
So the wilderness remained. Untouched. Unclaimed. Waiting.
It was said that the deeper one walked, the more the world itself seemed to twist. The air grew heavy, pressing against lungs like iron chains. The ground grew slick, blackened, damp with an invisible rot. And the silence—it was the silence that broke men. No insects, no rustling leaves, no growls of hidden beasts. Only the echo of one's heartbeat, too loud, too fragile, in a place where life itself did not belong.
Some said the wilderness had no end. That it stretched into eternity, an endless maze of skeletal trees and choking fog. Others swore that at its heart lay something terrible, something so ancient even time itself bent around it.
They were both wrong.
For at the center of that forbidden land, beyond the reach of mortal courage and immortal arrogance alike, there lay an egg.
It was vast, larger than palaces, its surface cracked and scarred yet unbroken. It did not gleam with light, nor did it shine with color. Instead, it pulsed faintly, like a heart too ancient to stop.
It was from this egg that the hunger came. For uncounted millennia, it had consumed. Not flesh, not bone, but essence itself. The lifeblood of the earth, the breath of the skies, the whispers of dying souls—it drank them all. What once had been rivers turned to dust. What once had been mountains withered into crags. What once had been beasts, fierce and proud, became nothing but bleached bones scattered across the wilderness floor.
And still, it devoured. Patient. Endless. Silent.
None who passed near it ever lived to tell the tale. For the egg did not tolerate witnesses. The land itself conspired to hide it, to bury its truth beneath fear and silence. Generations lived and died never knowing that the source of all dread, the grave of all hope, slumbered at the center.
But tonight, the wilderness was restless.
The crooked trees shivered though no wind blew. The air thickened until even the shadows seemed to choke. For the first time in a thousand years, the pulse of the egg quickened.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
A soundless beat that rippled through soil and stone, reaching even the farthest edges of the Forbidden.
And then—
A crack.
Barely audible, softer than the snapping of a twig. Yet in the silence of the wilderness, it was louder than thunder.
The egg… had stirred.