Time no longer moved.
It began to spin.
A cycle without end, like a black whirlpool swallowing light and spitting it out again as crawling, breathing, whispering shadows.
When Ashen came out of the River of Screams, there was no ground and no sky.
Only darkness.
But the darkness was not still — it pulsed, as if it had a heart.
And that heart… was inside him.
The black mass around him started to gather, rotating, shrinking, until it formed a giant womb — alive, throbbing like a dying cosmic heart.
From within it came the voice of the Savage Will, not as words this time, but as a sensation seeping straight into his nerves:
> "You have not been born yet."
"Everything you went through was only preparation for your true birth."
Suddenly, pain flooded his body.
It wasn't normal pain — it was a reversed birth.
Something inside him twisted, trying to tear its way out of his skin.
He screamed, but no sound came out.
The shadows around him absorbed the scream like the ground absorbs rain.
When he thought his body would collapse, black light exploded.
A distorted figure came out of him — it looked like him, but bent, crushed, bleeding from every joint.
It was him… but not him.
---
He woke up after an unknown time.
His body was no longer the same.
His arms were too long, his skin gray, his face blurry and formless.
Every movement made his bones crack as if they were breaking inside.
Then the voice came again, cold and neutral like judgment:
> "Every day you will be born again… and every day you must kill yourself."
"If you don't… you will become the monster."
He didn't understand.
But when he tried to move, shadows crept out from under his skin, multiplying, taking human forms — twisted beings crawling toward him.
They looked exactly like him… except for their eyes.
Their eyes were empty.
He realized they were his failed incarnations —
the previous births he never completed, the versions he left behind when he lost control.
And each of them was trying to take his place.
He did the only thing he could do.
He killed them.
Then he killed himself.
---
That scene repeated every day.
Each day he was born again inside the womb of shadows, and each day he emerged as a different creature —
sometimes with many arms, sometimes without skin, sometimes made of smoke, sometimes of living red flesh.
And each time, he had to end his life before he lost his mind and turned into a permanent beast.
At first, the pain was unbearable.
Every death was real, and every birth was worse than the last.
He could no longer tell the difference between the moment of his birth and the moment of his death —
both were wounds that never closed.
He could hear his bones breaking while he screamed inside his body.
He watched himself being torn apart and reshaped, buried again inside his own flesh.
And with each death, he came back weaker… and closer to madness.
---
The first decades passed like a nightmare of blood and shadow.
Then he began to lose his sense of pain.
The Savage Will that watched him started to reach deeper — into his soul.
It no longer spoke to him.
It played with him.
Some days, he was born as a mindless creature moving only by instinct —
attacking, biting, screaming.
When he became aware of what he was doing, he killed himself without hesitation.
On other days, he was born hearing voices urging him to stop, to surrender to the shadows, to become one of them.
> "Why do you keep killing yourself?"
"Don't you feel peace when you let us take control?"
"Come… return to the shadow."
Those voices were his own —
Ashens who had failed and died.
---
By the middle of the century, he no longer knew who he was.
Was he the current version? Or one of the past ones that somehow survived?
Was he the killer or the killed?
Had he really died hundreds of times, or was it all an illusion created by the Savage Will to test him?
He started talking to himself.
He started doubting himself.
He saw his own reflection in the shadows laughing at him.
With every new birth, he felt the darkness devouring more of his soul.
Only a small core remained, glowing faintly with blood in his chest —
his desire for revenge, the only thing the shadows couldn't touch.
He clung to it like a drowning man clings to driftwood.
He whispered it in every new birth:
> "Revenge… revenge… revenge…"
The word became a heartbeat inside him,
a small flame within the womb of darkness,
an eternal promise that refused to die.
---
As the final century approached, the births slowed down.
The shadows no longer twisted him as before.
His body began to stabilize, as if the Savage Will finally acknowledged his endurance.
But it wasn't the end.
On the last day of the century,
when he was born one final time, his body was no longer deformed.
He looked human — or almost.
But his head felt unbearably heavy.
He reached for his face and found his left eye bleeding endlessly.
His blood was dark, alive, throbbing like a living creature.
Then he heard the Savage Will whisper inside him, satisfied this time:
> "You have finally been born… but you will no longer see the light with both eyes."
"This eye will see only shadows… to remind you of what you were."
Ashen lifted his head, staring into the dark void that had been his womb for a hundred years.
He saw only himself —
thousands of his own versions gathered in circles, staring at him with empty eyes, smiling.
He placed his hand over his chest, where the core of the Savage Will still glowed, and said quietly, like a vow to the universe itself:
> "The shadows will not be buried inside me… I will be the one to bury them."
Then the darkness around him shattered.
The womb exploded into black dust that rose toward the sky.
The ground beneath his feet split open, revealing a new staircase —
one covered in ash and bones.
From above, the voice of the Heavenly Dao returned, cold and detached:
> "You have endured a hundred years of birth and death…"
"But remember, son of blood… every birth leaves a mark."
Ashen lifted his head, one eye bleeding and the other glowing faintly red with suppressed madness,
and said in a weary voice filled with pain, delirium, and confusion:
"How much time has passed?"
A simple question — yet it carried within it suffering, regret, and a scattered self lost in time.
Then he stepped onto the next stair.
The fourth trial began.