After a moment that felt like an eternity, the voice of the Heavenly Dao rang out like a sacred decree.
The flames of regret ignite the fuse of blood. The third trial: the Blood Trial.
Without knowing how, Ashen found himself in a vast arena.
The arena stretched endlessly, its ground like a carpet of white bones carved with strange markings that looked like the cries of the dead. The air was heavy, filled with the smell of rusty iron, as if the place had been breathing blood for countless ages. At its edges stood massive tombs, like stone towers, each larger than a temple, cracked and leaking thick black blood that ran down the walls and gathered in clotted pools around them.
Above this tainted ground, coffins hung suspended in the sky. Hundreds, thousands of them, dangling by black chains from the void, swaying slowly, giving off a deep groan each time they struck one another. The sound echoed like an endless funeral bell, seeping into souls and breaking their resolve.
At the edges of the arena stood twisted creatures: their limbs bent, faces without features, skin torn to reveal pulsing flesh beneath. Each one held a primitive drum, made from stretched human skin over rusty bones. With every strike, the ground shook, and hearts quivered. The rhythm was slow at first, like the heartbeat of a dying man, then grew faster, striking a beat filled with blood, savagery, and the pull into a pit with no escape.
But among this chaos, one thing overshadowed everything else.
In one corner of the arena rose a massive coffin, as large as a stone palace, completely covered in terrifying blood-red carvings. The carvings were not fixed; they writhed and shifted, reshaping themselves to tell stories of ancient massacres. Corpses slaughtered, caravans burning, rivers of blood flowing—all changing before the eyes, as if the coffin held the memory of the world's carnage.
Thick spiked chains wrapped around the coffin, like giant bleeding serpents. Each spike was like a dagger stabbed into its body. Guarding it were larger, more deformed creatures: with two heads, arms ending in clawed hooks, and dead eyes that could not see but still watched everything. Their presence alone made the air heavy, as if the arena itself shrank under their weight.
With every drumbeat, the chains shuddered. The spiked iron screamed, and the air cracked around it. Then, suddenly, the drums rose to a terrifying peak, and the chains exploded all at once. Blood sparks flew, and the massive coffin opened slowly, its creak like the groan of hell being pulled from the depths of eternity.
From inside emerged something that was neither human nor beast… but a twisted mix of both.
Ashen stared, his breath slowing until his chest felt frozen. What came out of the coffin was not a stranger to him… it was himself.
Its face was half melted, the skin eaten away to reveal the bone beneath. The right eye was gone, while the left glowed with a harsh blood-red light, devoid of mercy. The bones of its chest jutted out between torn flesh, as if the body had been cut apart and stitched back together in a gruesome way. Its limbs were crooked but taut with brutal strength, every movement releasing the grinding sound of bone against bone.
Around its body rose a deadly blood aura. Not the usual aura of cultivators—this one was more primitive, more savage, like a living pool of blood boiling and sending out waves of blind hostility. Every drop in that aura screamed a single call: kill.
Ashen froze.
It felt like he was facing a mirror, but a mirror raised from the depths of hell. This was not an "enemy," not some strange beast from another world… it was him. A version stripped of everything human, twisted into the embodiment of blood, savagery, and madness.
His heart felt crushed. Memories flooded into him without mercy: the cries of his clan, the blood spilled on the night of the massacre, the oath he had sworn moments ago to drown the world in blood. And now, this creature… it looked like the living form of that oath.
He wanted to take a step back, but his legs refused to move. His body was paralyzed between shock and crushing dread.
"Is this… me?"
The question stabbed into his mind like a knife.
"Is this what I will become? Or was I like this from the start?"
The twisted version smiled. A crooked smile, half melted flesh, half bare bone. There was no life in it, only dry mockery.
The drums stopped suddenly. Silence covered the arena. Even the hanging coffins stopped swaying. Everything in the world seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the next moment.
Ashen raised his head slowly, his eyes shining with a sharp glint.
This was the moment, the first realization… he was about to face himself. Not as a symbol, not as a memory, but as a living, savage enemy that knew nothing but killing.