Suotuo City outskirts, late afternoon.
The sun hung low, painting the rundown wooden sign "Shrek Academy" in faded green.
Tang San wiped sweat from his brow after the gruelling entrance trial against Zhao Wuji. Xiao Wu bounced lightly beside him, twin scorpion braids swaying, her eyes bright with excitement. Dai Mubai, arms folded, leaned against the gate with the satisfied smirk of someone who had already proven himself.
Grandmaster Yu Xiaogang and Dean Flender stood discussing the new enrollees when the air suddenly… changed.
It was not a surge of spirit power. It was not killing intent. It was something far more fundamental—like the world itself had taken a breath it had forgotten to take for aeons.
Every bird in the surrounding trees fell silent. The wind died. Even the dust motes in the sunlight seemed to freeze mid-air.
Then they came.
First, a ripple in reality, as though someone had dragged a finger across wet paint. From that ripple stepped a pale youth—barely sixteen in appearance, skin almost translucent, hair a colour that could not decide whether it was black or the absence of all colour. His eyes were deep, swirling voids that reflected no light, yet somehow everyone felt seen when he looked at them.
He wore simple dark robes that seemed to drink in the sunset, and he walked with no hurry, as if time itself waited for him.
But he was not alone.
Three steps behind him, always exactly three steps, walked figures that should not have existed in the light of day.
To the left: a tall, slender man in an immaculate black suit, skin pitch-dark, featureless save for a wide, knowing smile that revealed too many teeth. Shadows writhed around him like living smoke. This was Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, in one of his countless masks.
To the right: a shifting mass of iridescent spheres and gates, a being that was simultaneously inside and outside space, its surface covered in eyes and tendrils that opened into other skies. Yog-Sothoth, the All-in-One and One-in-All.
Slightly behind and above, floating without touching the ground, a vast darkness that suggested trees, goats, and a thousand young—Shub-Niggurath's lesser projection, restrained yet still radiating fecund horror.
Smaller presences flitted at the edges of perception: blind flautists with no faces, formless spawn, things that were angles and not angles. All of them moved in perfect synchrony, an honour guard that had escorted their Sultan across infinite voids.
They did not hide. They did not diminish their presence. They simply followed, silent, adoring, inevitable.
Zhao Wuji, still rubbing his bruised ribs from the earlier fight, felt his spirit power tremble. "What… the hell… is that?"
Flender's glasses slipped down his nose. Grandmaster's ever-calm expression cracked for the first time in years.
Tang San's hand instinctively went to his sleeve, hidden weapons ready. Xiao Wu stepped closer to him, ears twitching. Dai Mubai's Evil Eyes widened, his tiger soul growling low.
The pale youth—Aza, though no one yet knew the name—stopped ten paces from the gate. The Outer Gods halted with him, arranging themselves in a perfect semicircle at his back, heads bowed in eternal reverence.
Aza tilted his head, as though listening to music only he could hear. Distant, mad piping drifted on the air for a heartbeat, then faded.
"I was… drawn here," he said softly. His voice carried layers—many voices at once, yet perfectly harmonious, like a choir speaking a single word. "This place smells of monsters. I think… I am one."
He looked directly at Flender. "May I enrol?"
Behind him, Nyarlathotep's smile widened further, an impossible arc. Yog-Sothoth's countless eyes blinked in unison. Shub-Niggurath's darkness pulsed once, as if in approval.
Flender swallowed hard. The registration fee flashed in his mind—money was money, even if it came from… whatever this was.
Grandmaster recovered first. "Your spirit rank?"
Aza raised a hand. Black-violet mist coalesced, forming a core of absolute nothingness that hurt to look at directly—the Void Nucleus martial soul. No rings yet, but the innate spirit power reading Grandmaster's device produced made the needle spin off the scale.
"Innate… full spirit power?" Grandmaster whispered. "No—beyond full."
Zhao Wuji laughed nervously. "Kid, you and your… friends… just want to join the academy? No conquest, no world-ending, nothing?"
Aza blinked slowly. "I do not know what I want yet. Only that I must walk this dream a while longer."
He glanced sideways at the approaching luxurious carriage bearing the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Clan emblem—Ning Rongrong was moments away from arriving.
Something in his void eyes flickered. Curiosity. The faintest note of interest in the endless piping.
Nyarlathotep leaned forward and whispered in a voice like silk over broken glass, audible only to Aza: "The light-bearer comes, my Sultan. She will sing with your darkness."
Aza did not respond, but the corner of his mouth twitched—the tiniest suggestion of a human smile.
Flender, sensing profit and terror in equal measure, cleared his throat. "Welcome to Shrek Academy. All of you."
The Outer Gods bowed deeper.
And thus, on the day Tang San formally became a Shrek monster, the greatest monster of all enrolled—followed openly by the court of the Outer Gods, who would walk beside him through every trial, every war, every heartbeat of the long dream to come.