The Shadow Hound's carcass was still radiating a faint, sickly heat, but Gu Hanzhou had already vanished into the shifting veils of smog.
He didn't bother trying to harvest anything from the beast. In the Order Realm, the smell of fresh blood was the loudest beacon you could light in the dark. He moved with agonizing precision, his boots pressing into the slick, oily industrial sludge. Every step was a gamble; one misplaced foot on a rusted canister or a shard of glass would ring through the silence like a funeral bell.
His destination loomed ahead, a jagged silhouette against the grey horizon: The Waste Pit.
It was a gargantuan crater at the fringe of the mining sector, a hundred meters across and of an unknowable depth. This was where the Night Order Legion dumped the "sins" of their industry—toxic slag, radioactive runoff, and the volatile, corrupted energy dregs left over from refining Order Ore.
To a regular mine-slave, the Pit was a graveyard. Simply standing near the rim for an hour would cause one's skin to blister and slough off in wet sheets. But to Gu Hanzhou, this hellscape was his only pharmacy.
Scritch... scratch...
From the jagged rim of the Pit, the sound of mutated carrion-beetles echoed—thousands of clicking legs scuttling over discarded metal.
Gu Hanzhou stood at the edge, hit by a wave of heat so acrid it felt like a physical blow to the face. Below, the pit was filled with a swirling, bioluminescent mist of deep violet. This was condensed "Waste Energy," the byproduct of broken laws and shattered physics.
His chest burned. The faint, jagged mark of his Order Blood—his "Awakening Vein"—was pulsing in a frantic rhythm. It was hungry. It was desperate. If he didn't stabilize the mutation with a fresh infusion of energy soon, the very power he had stolen would turn inward and liquefy his heart.
Without a moment's hesitation, Gu Hanzhou gripped the corroded rungs of a service ladder and descended into the purple fog.
The moment his boots touched the bottom, he heard a sharp hiss. The concentrated acidic runoff at the base of the Pit was already eating through the soles of his shoes.
"Ngh...!"
Gu Hanzhou ground his teeth together so hard he heard the bone creak. He waded through the knee-deep toxic sludge toward a half-buried chemical reactor in the center. Clinging to the side of the reactor were clusters of crystalline, semi-solid growths—Order Dregs.
They were the most impure, most volatile form of energy in existence. Taking them into the body was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
He reached out a hand scarred by years of hard labor and pried a chunk loose.
The sensation was instantaneous. The moment the violet crystal touched his palm, it felt like a brand of white-hot iron. It burned through his epidermis, searing into his nerves. Gu Hanzhou didn't let go. Instead, he crushed the crystal in his fist and sat cross-legged in the middle of the acidic swamp, the toxic mist swirling around him like a shroud.
In the Legion's holy scriptures, this act was defined as "Self-Extinction." No sane man attempted to absorb raw, unrefined dregs. The chaotic, jagged rules of the universe contained within that energy would usually tear a human mind into shrieking fragments.
But Gu Hanzhou wasn't a sane man. He was a slave with no other choice. He didn't have access to the pristine, filtered "Order Potions" the nobles used. He only had the trash.
"Bring it on..." he hissed through bloodied lips.
He closed his eyes and forced his internal circulation to open, dragging the violent violet energy into his veins.
In an instant, his perception of the world shattered.
He was no longer in the Waste Pit. He was standing in a fractured, obsidian wasteland under a sky made of broken glass. Whispers—thousands of them—crawled into his ears, the voices of the "Dark Order" trying to dissolve his sanity.
Give up... let the dark take you... why suffer for a world that hates you?
"Shut up," Gu Hanzhou growled in the theater of his mind.
Back in reality, his body was a warzone. The violet energy was like a rampaging beast, tearing through his capillaries and swelling his veins until they looked like black serpents beneath his skin. His vision swam with blood. The pain was so absolute that his brain screamed at him to bash his head against the reactor until it split open, just to make it stop.
But then, the image of his mother flickered in his mind. He remembered her face—not when she was healthy, but at the end. He remembered her turning into a mass of twitching tentacles, a victim of the very mutation he was now courting. Yet, in her final moment of lucidity, she had used her sharpening claws to scratch two words into the dirt: "STAY ALIVE."
"Compared to that... this is nothing," Gu Hanzhou roared internally.
His eyes snapped open, blood leaking from the corners. He didn't just wait for the energy to settle; he turned his own blood into a predator. He commanded his "Awakening Vein" to strike, to swallow, to digest the chaotic dregs.
BOOM.
A physical shockwave erupted from his chest, blowing the purple mist back in a perfect circle. The crystal in his hand crumbled into grey, lifeless ash.
On his chest, the faint red mark had transformed. It was no longer a smudge; it was now a sharp, jagged hook-shaped sigil, shimmering with a dark, metallic gold edge.
The Awakening Phase: Solidified.
Gu Hanzhou stood up. His body, once heavy with the fatigue of a lifetime of labor, now felt light—packed with a terrifying, explosive tension. His senses had expanded exponentially. He could hear the drip of acid fifty meters away; he could even hear the mechanical click of a Legion patrol changing a battery pack in the distance.
However, before he could take a step, a sense of impending doom locked onto his spine.
This pressure was a hundred times more suffocating than the Shadow Hound.
"Show yourself," Gu Hanzhou said, his voice flat and cold. He gripped his iron rebar, his knuckles cracking.
From the swirling purple fog, a tall, slender silhouette emerged.
It wasn't a monster.
It was a man wearing a long, crimson coat that looked like it was tailored from dried blood. At his hip hung an ornate, long-bladed saber, and on his collar was the silver embroidery of the Inquisition—the most feared branch of the Night Order Legion.
"A mine-slave... performing a forced Awakening in a Waste Pit," the man mused. He stopped ten paces away, his gloved fingers tapping rhythmically on the hilt of his blade. He looked at Gu Hanzhou with the amused curiosity of a scientist looking at a cockroach that refused to die. "And remarkably, you haven't turned into a pile of weeping, mindless meat."
Gu Hanzhou didn't reply. Every muscle in his body was coiled like a spring.
The Inquisition. They were the "Madmen of the Order," the ones tasked with purging "Heretics" and "Defective Units." To them, an unauthorized Awakening was the highest form of treason.
"Don't be so tense, little rat," the man smiled, though his eyes remained as cold as a mountain peak. "The name is Lin Xiu. I happen to be in the market for a 'Consumable'—someone to head into the deep tunnels and scout a Dark Order Rift."
He leaned forward slightly, his aura expanding like a crushing weight. "I'll give you two choices. I can chop off your limbs and toss you into the pit to feed the beetles... or, you can come with me."
Gu Hanzhou looked at the saber at Lin Xiu's waist. He knew the difference in their power. At his current level, he was a candle flame standing before a forest fire.
But he didn't show fear. He didn't show submission.
"Third choice," Gu Hanzhou rasped, his body leaning forward into a predatory crouch. "I kill you. I take the sword."
Lin Xiu froze for a heartbeat, then erupted into a fit of wild, arrogant laughter.
"Exquisite! Truly exquisite! It's been a long time since I've met a madman with such clarity."
Lin Xiu's expression went stone-cold in a flash. His saber cleared its sheath by a mere half-inch. A wave of invisible, frigid blade-intent sliced through the air, gouging a deep trench into the acidic floor between them.
"Then let's see which is harder," Lin Xiu whispered. "Your luck... or my steel."
Gu Hanzhou stared at the blade.
He waited.
He waited for that newly fused, violent energy in his heart to ignite his very first drop of True Order Blood.