When Ashen opened his eyes, the ground beneath his body had turned into a lake of blood.
He didn't know how much time had passed since the last time he lost consciousness, but even the air felt heavier, filled with the smell of iron and ashes.
He lifted his body with difficulty. Bones creaked, skin was torn, and half his face was covered in clotted blood.
But his body wasn't dead — it was still beating.
The fire of life, inherited from his clan's bloodline, slowly began to burn again.
He whispered hoarsely, barely audible:
"I'm… still breathing."
He knew that rest was only an illusion.
This world — the world of tribulation — existed only to break him again and again.
---
The First Ten Years After the Catastrophe
The first years passed with endless slowness.
Every day was a war against endless hordes of blood beasts.
He didn't sleep — he collapsed, then woke again inside a new hell.
A thousand types of beasts, all manifestations of raw malice, stalked him from the shadows.
He fought, cut, bit, was torn apart, then forced his body to stand again.
His blood became part of the earth, and his soul kept bleeding without end.
Then, at the end of the tenth year — the first finger appeared.
From the sky, in the middle of a bloody storm, a glowing red mass formed.
It stretched slowly until it became a giant finger of pure malice, as tall as mountains, shining as if made from living celestial flesh.
Its movement sounded like the screams of a thousand souls being slaughtered at once.
"Ashen…"
It called his name.
The echo made the earth tremble and the blood in his veins boil.
He raised his head, fire burning in his eyes — not fear, but defiance.
Then he screamed and charged at it with all the life he had left.
He used the "Energy Shock" at its highest limit.
Seismic force erupted from his fists. Waves of blood exploded around him; rocks, flesh, and ash rose into the air.
But before that giant finger, he was nothing more than an insect screaming at a storm.
When the strike landed, half his body shattered instantly.
His blood scattered like rain, and his bones turned to dust.
But he didn't die.
The ancient blood within him — his clan's legacy — ignited, weaving his body anew.
When he rose again, after days or maybe months — he couldn't tell — he looked up at the sky and said quietly:
"Death is nothing but a disgraceful release."
"As long as you haven't fulfilled the blood oath and vengeance, death is forbidden to your soul, Ashen."
---
Every ten years after that were more brutal than the last.
The beasts grew larger, faster, more insane.
Their malice no longer only attacked his body — it tried to tear his soul apart.
The second finger fell upon him while he fought in a sea of corpses.
His body was stronger this time, but the finger was fiercer.
His body was completely destroyed, leaving only a single beating heart in a pit of blood.
But the blood seal on his chest didn't fade — it burned brighter.
His body rebuilt itself, piece by piece, as if the blood obeyed an ancient command from his father.
The third finger was fiery to the touch — every strike burned the sky itself.
He fought it with scorched hands and a charred face, but he didn't retreat.
Every time the malice thought it had ended him, he rose again, fiercer than before.
With the passing years, Ashen's face no longer resembled that of a child.
It was like a statue carved by blood and suffering.
His eyes, though small, saw beyond existence itself.
---
When the sixtieth year came, everything changed.
The sky no longer sent a single finger — but two.
From the bloody clouds, two gigantic fingers of malice emerged, intertwining as if splitting the heavens in half.
The ground opened beneath his feet, and the horizon itself cracked.
Each strike from a single finger could erase a city — yet he faced them alone.
He used the "Grand Shock" in a new form — merging it with blood energy directly.
When he released it, the ground beneath him turned into a black pit stretching for miles,
but the two fingers did not vanish — they came back even stronger.
He fell. He rose. He shattered. He returned.
He repeated it thousands of times until he could no longer tell the difference between pain and existence.
In the seventieth year, there were three fingers waiting.
Four in the eightieth, five in the ninetieth.
Each one represented a new layer of malice, of cosmic hatred itself.
As if the entire universe had decided he must be erased.
His body became pale like a corpse, but the light in his eyes never faded.
Every time he survived, he rose slowly, dragging his feet across rivers of blood, looked up at the sky, and whispered:
"As long as my blood flows and my heart beats, my oath and my existence will drown the world in blood and ashes."
---
The Hundredth Year
The final day came without warning.
The sky, black for centuries, suddenly turned a bright crimson like fire.
Even the air became liquid, dripping blood.
Then the world shook.
The giant hourglass that had floated above the arena since the beginning of the trial began to tremble.
The red sand inside no longer moved slowly — it spun violently like a tornado.
A cosmic hum pierced the heavens.
Ashen lifted his head and felt something breaking inside him — not his body, but time itself.
When it moved, it was as if the sky was being crushed.
The air exploded, the ground melted, and all existence began to shudder as if facing the end of everything.
Ashen stood alone, blood dripping from his mouth, his eyes burning with dark crimson light.
He no longer felt fear.
After a hundred years of agony, there was nothing left that could hurt him more.
Light disappeared.
Noise vanished.
The entire world turned into a single point of silence.
Then, from that point, came one sound — the sound of time itself breaking.
The massive hourglass that had watched everything shattered.
Its red sands exploded into millions of shards flying through the sky.
But not a single grain fell — all turned into liquid blood rising upward.
The sky, in all its vastness, began to bleed.
Scars of red light opened, pouring rivers of blood upward instead of downward, as if the earth itself had lost its meaning.
The world collapsed — mountains broke apart, the land crumbled, beasts screamed then melted away.
Ashen stood in the middle of that cosmic ruin.
His eyes followed the scene without blinking.
Everything around him was dissolving, yet inside he heard something new:
a calm, deep heartbeat echoing through his blood.
A heartbeat not of this world —
the heartbeat of the ancient clan.
Blood rose around him, wrapping his body like a cloak of souls, while the sky continued to bleed.
The voice of the heavenly dao echoed across existence:
"When the sky bleeds, something is born from the ashes — something that has no name yet…"