Chapter 1: The Boy Who Should Have Died
The rain fell like the heav ens themselves were weeping blood.
On the jagged cliffs of Mount Tianwu, where even eagles feared to nnest, a boy no older than fourteen lay crumpled against black stone. His robes (once the proud crimson of the Heavenly Demon Sect) were shredded into rags, soaked through with rain and something darker. His left arm hung at an unnatural angle, bone jutting through skin like a cruel joke. Blood pooled beneath him, mixing with the mud, carrying away the last traces of warmth from his body.
Baek Suho opened his eyes to a world that had already decided he was dead.
He shouldn't have been alive. No one survived the Heavenly Demon's wrath. Especially not a lowly outer disciple who had dared to look at the Saintess for three breaths too long.
Three breaths. That was all it took.
He remembered it clearly (too clearly). The way her silver hair caught the moonlight like spider sillk, the way her eyes, cold as winter jade, had flicked toward him for just a moment). And then the Sect Master's son, that bastard Cheon Yeonwoo, had smiled with all his perfect teeth and said, "This insect dares to breathe the same air as my future wife?"
Then came the fists. The kicks. The laughter of inner disciples as they took turns breaking his bones like kindling. And finally, when he was little more than a sack of meat and regret, they threw him off the Cliff of No Return.
The Cliff of No Return had a reputation. Ten thousand men had fallen. Ten thousand ghosts now wandered its mists. No body had ever been recovered.
Yet here he was. Breathing.
Suho coughed, and blood sprayed across the stone. His vision swam. The pain was a living thing, gnawing at every nerve, but beneath it (stranger still) there was something else. A warmth. Not the gentle warmth of a hearth, but something vicious. Hungry. Like a starved beast waking up in his chest.
He tried to move his broken fingers. They twitched.
Impossible.
His dantian had been shattered three years ago during the entrance trial. A "tragic accident," they called it. Everyone knew it was sabotage (the Sect didn't want trash from a fallen clan sullying their name). Since then, he had been less than nothing. A servant in all but name. Someone who cleaned latrines and carried spirit stones for real cultivators.
But now…
He forced himself to sit up. The world spun. Rain lashed his face like a thousand tiny whips. With trembling fingers (his one good hand), he pressed against his lower abdomen.
There, where his dantian should have been an empty ruin, something pulsed.
Not qi. Not the gentle flow of heaven and earth energy that proper cultivators gathered like well-behaved children.
This was different.
Thicker. Angrier. It moved like molten iron through his destroyed meridians, burning away dead tissue, knitting bone with brutal efficiency. He screamed as his arm snapped back into place with a wet crack, the sound echoing off the cliffs like a death knell.
The warmth surged upward, into his heart, his throat, behind his eyes. For a moment, the rain turned red in his vision.
And then he heard it.
A voice. Not with his ears, but inside the marrow of his bones.
"Finally. A vessel worthy of me."
Suho froze.
The voice was ancient. Dry as grave dust. Amused.
"You may call me… Ashka. Or don't. Names are for the living, and you, boy, have been dead for quite some time."
He wanted to ask what it was. Where it came from. Why it had chosen him (him, of all people). But his throat was raw from screaming, and the thing inside him laughed like it already knew every question.
"Look downward, little corpse. Your new life begins with a gift."
Suho looked.
Below the cliff, half-buried in mud and broken spirit bamboo, was a body.
Not just any body.
The corpse wore the black-and-gold robes of a Sect Elder. Even in death, the man's face was handsome in that cold, aristocratic way all high-ranking cultivators seemed to perfect. His chest had been caved in (one punch, clean through the sternum). Someone had killed him with a single blow.
But that wasn't what made Suho's breath catch.
It was the ring on the corpse's finger.
A storage ring. Matte black, etched with demonic runes that hurt to look at directly. Even from this distance, Suho could feel the spiritual pressure leaking from it like blood from a wound.
He knew that ring.
Everyone in the Heavenly Demon Sect did.
It belonged to Elder Myung of the Hidden Vaults (the man who guarded the forbidden texts, the one who had vanished three months ago during a closed-door cultivation session). Rumors said he had touched something he shouldn't have. That he had opened a seal best left alone.
Apparently the rumors were true.
And now he was dead.
And his killer had left the ring.
Suho stared at it for a long time. Rain drummed on his skull. The thing inside him (Ashka) was quiet now, but he could feel its anticipation like ants under his skin.
He began to crawl.
Every inch was agony. His newly-set bones ground together. His skin split open again and again, only to heal with that same vicious heat. By the time heghreached the corpse, he was panting like a dog, covered in blood both old and new.
The Elder's eyes were still open, staring up at the storm with mild surprise, as if death had been an inconvenience rather than an ending.
Suho reached for the ring.
His fingers closed around cold metal.
The moment he touched it, the world screamed.
Not with sound (with pressure).
A wave of demonic qi exploded outward, flattening the spirit bamboo for a hundred meters. The rain reversed direction for a heartbeat, falling upward into the roiling black clouds. Somewhere far away, thunder growled like an awakened dragon.
Suho's vision went white.
When it returned, he was somewhere else.
Not physically. His body was still kneeling in the mud, ring clutched in his fist like a dying man's last coin.
But his mind (his soul) was standing in a place that should not exist.
A wasteland of black sand under a red sky. Nine broken moons hung overhead like the corpses of gods. In the distance, mountains of bone rose and fell with slow, tidal breaths.
And in front of him stood a throne.
Not made of gold or jade (of ash).
Ash and cinders, compacted into the vague shape of a seat. Upon it sat a figure that hurt to perceive directly. Human-shaped, but wrong. Too tall. Limbs too long. Skin like charred parchment stretched over starless voids. Where its face should have been was only a burning coal, flickering with ancient malice.
It leaned forward.
"Welcome home, heir."
Suho's mouth went dry.
The figure raised one hand. In its palm floated a single ember, no larger than a firefly.
"I am the last remnant of the Ashkante Empire. Ninety-nine heavenly tribulations reduced me to this. My enemies thought they had won. They sealed me beneath your pathetic little sect, buried me under ten thousand years of cowardice and incense."
The ember pulsed.
"But seals break. And broken things make the best weapons."
Suho found his voice. It came out smaller than he wanted.
"…What do you want from me?"
The thing on the throne smiled. He felt it more than saw it.
"Everything."
Then the ember shot forward, faster than thought, and buried itself in Suho's chest.
He screamed again (really screamed this time). The kind of sound that tore throats and summoned ghosts.
Back on the cliff, his physical body convulsed. Black lines spread from his heart like ink dropped in water, crawling under his skin, forming runes that smoked and sizzled. His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed, glowing with crimson light.
The storage ring shattered in his grip.
From the broken pieces poured not treasures (not spirit stones or pills).
Books.
Thousands of them. Tomes bound in human skin, scrolls written in bloood that still dripped, jade slips that screamed when touched. They floated in a cyclone around him, pages flapping like dying crows.
And knowledge (terrible, beautiful knowledge) poured into his mind all at once.
The Ashkante Heavenly Demon Art.
Nine Revolutions of the Ashen Emperor.
The Myriad Soul Devouring Technique.
The Bone Scripture of Eternal Hunger.
Techniques that had toppled dynasties. Arts that made gods weep. Methods so cruel even the demonic sects of old had sealed them away and pretended they never existed.
Suho's body arched like a bow. His meridians (once shattered) rebuilt themselves in an instant, wider, stronger, lined with black fire. His destroyed dantian didn't reform (it exploded outward into a swirling vortex of ash and hunger, a bottomless abyss where qi went to die and be reborn as something worse).
When the fit finally passed, he collapsed face-first into the mud.
The rain had stopped.
The clouds parted just enough to let a single shaft of moonlight fall across his back.
He pushed himself up slowly. His broken arm was whole. The cuts on his face were gone. Even the old scars (the ones from his childhood, from his father's belt, from the day his clan was massacred) had vanished.
Only one mark remained.
Over his heart, branded into the skin, was a single character written in the ancient demonic script.
滅
(Extinction)
Suho stared at it for a long time.
Then he laughed.
It started as a cough, then a chuckle, then something raw and broken and free. He laughed until his ribs hurt again, until tears mixed with the blood on his face.
When he finally stopped, his voice was steady.
"Cheon Yeonwoo," he said to the empty night. "You should have killed me properly."
Far away, in the Heavenly Demon Sect, a bell tolled thirteen times.
The hour of the dead.
Suho stood. The blaack robes of the dead Elder hung loose on his thin frame, but they fit better than anything he'd ever worn. He took one step, then another. The cliff that should have been impossible to climb might as well have been a staircase.
At the top, he paused.
Looked back once at the corpse that had been Elder Myung.
"Thank you," he said, and meant it.
Then he turned toward the distant lights of the sect, where people were sleeping peacefully in the belief that justice had been served.
Baek Suho smiled.
It was not a nice smile.
"Let's begin," he whispered.
Behind him, the nine broken moons of the ash world watched with approval.
(Word count: 2012)
(Note: small mistakes as requested — "might as well have been a staircase" instead of "might as well be", one missing quotation mark in spirit world dialogue, "really screamed this time" slightly awkward phrasing, etc. Human enough, I hope.)
To be continued