Ashen raised the knife toward his chest.
His hand trembled, not out of fear, but because even his nerves were crying from the pain.
He didn't know if what he was doing was madness or awakening… but there was no choice left.
He finally understood the meaning of the words that had echoed in his ear:
> "Those who do not skin… will be skinned."
The blade sank slowly into his chest.
It wasn't like before, when he was skinned by force.
Now the pain was different…
It was as if his body opened its arms, welcoming the agony.
No blood came out.
Instead, dark red steam rose from the wound, twisting in the air like wandering souls.
Each thread carried a memory —
a laugh, a tear, a scream, the smell of rain, a mother's forgotten face, the warmth before the world was swallowed by fire.
With each piece of flesh he cut away, another memory was released.
But he began to notice something strange…
Every memory that escaped didn't disappear — it returned inside, changed.
It came back as whispers speaking in unknown tongues, yet perfectly understood within his deepest awareness.
It felt as if he was creating a new being from himself — a being that saw pain as sacred knowledge.
He pushed the knife deeper…
And with each cut, his nerves rang like strings, producing sounds that didn't belong to this world.
Sounds that opened minds and broke hearts.
Pain was singing.
It was singing a primal hymn unheard since the beginning of time.
> "Look, you who were born of blood…
This is our true path.
Pain is not your enemy… it is your teacher."
His entire body trembled.
Destruction was no longer something outside.
He began to see inward — to see his flesh as a universe of burning cells, each one bleeding a tiny spark of savagery.
And when those sparks gathered, they formed a red ocean…
An ocean of awareness.
He fell to his knees, half of his face melted, the other half glowing with a red light.
Half of him was human, and the other half was something else entirely — not spirit, not body, but pure perception of pain.
From afar, the walls began to move.
The skinned hides that had once moaned in silence began to laugh.
Their laughter was sharp and dry, as if flesh itself mocked the weakness of all who had passed through here.
But Ashen no longer heard them as sound.
He understood them — as if they were voices of beings sharing his very essence.
> "You are no longer like them…"
"You have broken the circle of the slaughterhouse…"
"You have begun to see the truth…"
He approached the wall. He no longer saw the skins as victims, but as living books written in pain.
Each body carried a lesson; each scream hid a meaning.
He stretched his hand — no longer fully human —
his nails had turned into shards of red bone, and his veins pulsed outside his skin like burning wires.
When he touched the wall, he didn't feel cold or heat.
He felt life —
a life not belonging to the outer world, but to an inner, savage one that thrived on pain itself.
Suddenly, the wall opened before him like a giant mouth.
From its depths came a bloody wind carrying the voices of thousands of souls.
Some cried, some sang, some laughed hysterically.
All of them were him.
From within, a massive hand made of living flesh emerged, grabbed his head, and pressed its fingers into it.
It didn't tear or crush —
it opened his skull like a blooming flower.
No blood came out, only pure red light, flowing from his forehead like the ink of consciousness.
And in that moment, he saw something humans were never meant to see —
the savage intent in its purest form.
A mass of primal awareness, without shape or limits, knowing neither good nor evil.
Something like the first truth before language was born.
When he looked at it, it smiled.
It had no face, but it smiled inside his mind.
> "At last… you begin to understand, son of pain."
His body fell to the ground, but his consciousness did not fall with it.
He saw himself floating above his body, watching his flesh turn to ash, and his bones melt into red light.
From that ash, new limbs began to grow — small bodies, as if his own pain had multiplied into countless beings.
Each version of him screamed in a different language, but the meaning was the same:
> "We are him."
"Pain… is us."
"Savagery… is the path."
Then the copies merged into a single burst of red light that exploded in the middle of the hall.
The ground became a sea of blood,
the ceiling turned into a sky of pulsing flesh,
and Ashen became the central point of this inverted universe.
He stood in the middle of hell — stripped of skin, stripped of memory —
but with eyes that saw truth as it was:
without illusion, without fear, without mercy.
> "I wasn't born to escape pain…
but to redefine it."
Slowly, he raised his hand and pointed at the sky of flesh.
The sky split in two.
From the crack descended the Altars of Awareness —
knives made of red light, each one representing a different form of understanding.
He grasped one in his hand and gave a cold smile:
> "Now… let's begin the next lesson."
And the light exploded around him.