The pain was unbearable... but the smell was worse.
Worst of all was the knowledge that this suffering was born of his own hand.
It began with a nauseating sizzle that made his mind recoil—a wet, unnatural sound that should never have originated from a living human. Then, the pain arrived.
He was surprised by the lag, the brief heartbeat of silence before the storm. But as a jagged scream tore from his throat, he realized the delay was merely the time it took for his nociceptors to be annihilated. What he was feeling now wasn't just a burn; it was the chemical scream of exposed nerves being liquidated by the heat.
"HIIIII—!"
His jaw trembled under the impossible strain of containing the sound.
Blood Weave refused to coagulate under the heat, its tenacious vitality fighting to stay liquid, to stay alive. Instead, it was his flesh that yielded. The tissue denatured, achieving the frantic hemostasis he had sought, but his leg did not thank him for the mercy. The reaction was primal, ancient, and violent.
His quadriceps fired in a frantic, involuntary spasm—a desperate attempt by his nervous system to recoil from the source of the trauma. His heel dug into the cold stone of the Cathedral floor, his muscles knotting so tight they felt ready to snap off the bone. But he grounded himself. Tears and blood streamed down his face as he used every ounce of his crumbling will to force his leg to remain beneath the white-hot steel.
"Nnggh—!"
The "scream" of his flesh was literal. As the moisture in his cells flash-boiled, tiny pockets of steam trapped beneath the skin popped and whistled—a macabre chorus of destruction. He felt the curved edge of the tachi sink deeper into his thigh. The heat wasn't just on the surface; it felt as though the temperature was traveling up his femur, a liquid fire that turned his marrow into molten lead.
He watched—unable to look away—as the vibrant, raw red of his muscle turned a sickly, bruised grey, and finally a charred, obsidian black. The blood, which had been a tenacious, pulsing river, met the heat and seemed to cry out in a perverse joy, carrying the thermal agony to every dark corner of his body.
His teeth rattled, his jaw on the verge of splintering under the pressure of his bite. His vision fractured, the world dissolving into a haze of grey smoke and white sparks. The pain had moved past a mere sensation; it had become a physical weight, crushing the air out of his lungs. Every nerve ending in his thigh fired a final, panicked signal of extinction before being silenced forever by the carbonizing heat.
Finally, he could no longer contain it.
A wailing sound tore through his throat, uncontained and raw. Zachary no longer cared if the shadows heard him. He no longer cared if the monsters outside were drawn to the sound. The scream and the sizzling were a nightmare, but the smell—god, the smell. It was acrid, nauseatingly sweet, and unbearably pungent.
It was the smell of himself.
His burning self cried out to the empty vaulted ceiling.
A heavy, suffocating silence eventually flooded the sacred room. Zachary pulled the blade away, resting the curved edge back against the fire as ragged, wet breaths escaped his throat. Minutes passed in that frozen state, until a heavy, mechanical beat thudded in his chest. The enchantment had activated again, refusing him the luxury of passing out.
His lips trembled, and a flat, foreign voice escaped his mouth.
"One down."
He clenched Midnight Shard in his destroyed hand as he raised his right arm behind his head. His torso trembled under the strain and he saw again the gaping wound ascending through his side, the gaping flesh and the sharp line crossing through his ribs. His eye trembled as he bit his lip until a trail of hot blood crawled down through his chin.
He brought the glowing blade closer to the next wound, but his arm seized. His hand began to tremble violently, his heart rate spiking as he slipped into hyperventilation. His body was a separate entity now, a terrified animal refusing to walk into the slaughter. But his Mind was the master; it willed the flesh to obey, and the steel bit in once more.
No sound escaped this time. The air caught in his throat, trapped by the violent contraction of his thorax. His ribs clung to his lungs in a stuttering, suffocating grip. His eye flooded with tears as he watched his own skin bubble and liquefy, but the job wasn't done.
The wound was massive, stretching from hip to armpit. The length of the tachi made the cauterization awkward and dangerously imprecise. Unable to find his breath, Zachary pressed the blade firmly against the raw meat of his side and began to drag it downward.
The dam broke. His lungs finally released his scream.
A wail tore through the Cathedral as he nearly bit through his own tongue. The skin bubbled and seared along the path of the sword, sticking to the burning curve of the metal in a sickening, tacky way before tearing free as the blade continued its descent. His heart faltered under the trauma. The rhythm grew weak and erratic, skipping beats as it tried to stop—but Zachary used the enchantment as a foothold, forcing his failing organ to continue its heavy, mechanical thudding.
Riding the frantic high of the epinephrine, he immediately twisted the blade and drove the orange-hot steel into the deep gash at the crook of his neck, right against the chipped clavicle.
His throat locked. The muscles in his neck tensed so hard the veins threatened to burst through the skin. His head flailed backward against the stone, a desperate, instinctive attempt to escape the climbing heat. The grey smoke rose directly into his nostrils, sticking to the back of his throat with a greasy, harrowing permanence.
He reached his breaking point.
Control of his motor functions snapped. He released his grip on the blade, and his body began to spasm and thrash in the corner of the room. He was a dying nerve, leaving traces of himself on the cold stone and the walls.
The worst of it, however, was Cinder Eyes.
The ability remained relentlessly active, sharpening his perception to a razor's edge. He couldn't go numb. He felt every micro-detail of the torture: the way the heat coursed through his blood like molten glass, the smell of carbonized hair and flesh clinging to the back of his skull, and the suffocating weight of the smoke on his skin. It felt eternal. He remembered thinking once that burning alive might be similar to being electrocuted. He had been so, so wrong.
Fighting for dominance over his own limbs, he reached for the tachi again. Tucking his right arm against his chest, he drove the metal into the mangled ruin of his bicep. The muscle fibers contracted and recoiled, making the process slow and agonizingly resistant. Finally, he returned the blade to the fire.
His mind began to drift toward the exit.
Where was he?
Right... the group was going to celebrate finals. The tall friend—the one who always needed help with his notes—was organizing a reunion at his flat. He promised it would be small, but by midnight, the room was so crowded that—
"Focus!" he screamed into the emptiness. He willed his mind back to the agonizing present.
"This is your pain, man! This is your burning self!" He grabbed the sword again, his voice a cracked, desperate roar. "Remember how this happened! You refused to die, so now you are here! This is the path you chose! Bear it!"
His skin and muscles were drenched in sweat, which trailed down into the fresh burns. The moment the salt hit the carbonized flesh, it began to blister into a slick, soapy texture. His own burning fat was reacting to the alkaline sweat, saponifying on his skin.
"The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes..." he wheezed, a delusional fragment of a phrase he'd heard once. It meant nothing. He was no hero.
Riding the peak of his agony, he pressed the sword against the massive gash on his chest. His vision went black, but the darkness only served to sharpen his remaining senses to a terrifying degree.
His flesh chanted a profane gospel of misery to the rhythm of his own screams as the blade descended from shoulder to hip—a blazing brush of cauterization and charcoal. He took a few detours on the way down, pulling the sticky, red-hot blade away just enough to mend the superficial gashes on his abdomen before pressing it back into the meat.
With each sizzle, with each searing note of his flesh's cry as the wounds were mended under the curse of fire, a silver image flashed through the void of his mind.
Nephis.
"How... How does she do this?!" Zachary cried out to the darkness, his voice cracking as the deep cut on his abdomen began to melt into itself.
A pained, exhausted breath escaped through his trembling teeth. Her image was being burned into the back of his brain alongside every sealed wound. She remained there, etched onto the blackness of his closed eyelid—another scar to match the ones he was carving into his skin.
With a final, jagged scream, he returned the blade to its place in the fire. A defeated, hollow sound escaped his mouth, accompanied by a long string of bloody saliva. He was tired. So tired. He tried to gulp, but his throat was a ruin of raw tissue from the constant screaming.
He wanted to rest his mind—just for a few seconds, perhaps a minute... maybe two—but he knew that was a death sentence.
He had to finish this before his reason returned. Before the logic of self-preservation could override the necessity of his survival.
Zachary twisted his neck with a pained groan, the newly burned flesh protesting the movement. His eye trembled at the sight of his left side. The sickly purple was deepening into a deadly, necrotic black. Small white spots drifted beneath the surface as the skin expanded and contracted in intermittent, hitching shifts—biological proof of the air infiltrating his tissue and the failing exchange of oxygen in his punctured lungs.
The "easy" part was over. Now, he had to reach inside.
Grabbing the makeshift knife in his right hand he aimed it at his side, but he couldn't go further. Zachary had to, but his Body refused—it pleaded for him to stop—but he couldn't... he wouldn't. So without daring to stop the trembling of his hand he pressed the edge into the side of his abdomen, right over the pulsing, necrotic blackness.
A choked whimper escaped him, and the skin parted with a wet, resistance-free glide that made his stomach turn. Tears streamed from his remaining eye, hot and salt-heavy, as he widened the aperture.
Then, he reached inside.
The sensation was a cognitive catastrophe. As his fingers breached the abdominal wall, he felt the internal heat of his own body—a humid, stifling warmth that felt alien. Immediately, he felt his blood surge. It circled his fingers in a frantic, rhythmic greeting, Blood Weave recognizing its master even as he desecrated himself.
A broken sob escaped him, his legs thrashing against the stone in a rhythmic, desperate beat. He couldn't see into the dark, wet cavity of his own chest, but he didn't need to. He followed the flow of his own life force.
His fingers brushed against something jagged and hard.
'Found you,' he thought through a haze of white-hot static. His teeth trembled and his mouth felt bloated.
He felt the shards of his own ribs. They were buried deep in the soft, spongy tissue of his lung. Every time he tried to breathe, those shards acted like hooks, tearing further into the organ. With a guttural, animalistic growl, he gripped the first splinter of bone.
The pain was no longer a sound; it was a vibration that shook his very sense of self.
He pulled. He felt the sickening schlick of the bone sliding out of the lung tissue. He moved the shard with the clinical precision of a butcher, forcing the bone back toward the intercostal line. He did it again with the second fragment, and then the third.
It was a messy work, he was injuring himself more than he already was. His conciousness began drifitng, but instead of finding solace in a nameless past, it only found a broken laughter.
'Next time... Next time I transmigrate, I'll be sure to study medicine...' His lampooning came tired and foreing. 'Yes.. I'll do that. Who needs philosophy at this point?'
As soon as the bones reached a semblance of their rightful place, his blood reacted. Blood Weave surged around the fractures like a living, crimson cast, the viscous fluid thickening to hold the jagged ends together. They were still broken, still a mosaic of ruin, but they were no longer a lethal threat.
His lung expanded—truly expanded—for the first time since the plaza.
Zachary withdrew his hand. It emerged dripping with a thick, dark gore, carrying traces of his own internal reality back into the cold air of the Cathedral. He didn't allow himself to look at the viscera coating his skin.
He didn't wait. He grabbed the Midnight Shard again and pressed the orange-hot steel against the fresh incision.
The sizzle was the crescendo in his profane gospel, silver appeared once again in his drifting Mind. His body slumped back against the stone, his hand falling limp into the pool of his own cooling blood.
He sat in the pooling darkness, steam still rising from his freshly sealed side. His breath came in shallow, rattling gasps, but the whistling had stopped. One victory.
Then he looked at his left arm.
It was a grotesque sight. The humerus had snapped mid-shaft, and the proximal end had punched through the deltoid, standing like a jagged, white monument of bone amidst the purple-black bruising. His hand hung at a dead, unnatural angle, the fingers curled like dried claws.
'If I let this knit like this...' he thought, his mind a fractured mirror of logic, 'I'll never hold a blade again...'
He reached out with his right hand—the one still stained with his own internal gore—and gripped his left wrist. The first movement was just to test the weight. A lightning bolt of agony shot straight into his brain, making his vision strobe. He realized with a sinking horror that the bone wasn't just out; it was wedged behind the muscle.
"N-no..." he whimpered, a rare, pathetic sound.
He had to reset it. He had to pull the arm until the bone cleared the muscle, then snap it back into the socket. Alone. Zachary hooked his left foot behind a protrusion in the room's wall for leverage. He wrapped a piece of discarded, torn priestess's cloth around his right hand to get a better grip on his own slick, mangled wrist.
His heart stuttered in dissonance, trying to release him from his self-torture through the mercy of a cardiac arrest. But he willed it to continue beating strong.
"I exist..." His voice escaped with reluctance, hoarse and weak.
"In thousands of agonies—I exist!" His voice began rising, his lip trembling in anger. "I'm tormented on the rack—but I exist!"
The defiant, blasphemous glow returned to his eye as his heart became the drum to his proclamation. This new prayer drowned the chorus of his crying flesh; the weight of the words blended and surged into something new. Something personal.
"Though I sit alone on a pillar—I exist!! You won't take that from me. I won and I lived! You think I'll beg again for death? Don't joke with me! I stood for myself and went against your miserable threat! I'll continue living and I'll continue fighting until I meet them again! WATCH ME!"
He didn't count to three. He simply lunged backward with his entire body weight.
CRACK-SCHLICK.
The sound was sickeningly loud in the hollow silence of the Priestess's room. It wasn't just a sound; it was a vibration he felt in his teeth. The bone retreated from the air, sliding back through the hole in his flesh with a wet, heavy suction.
Zachary's scream wasn't human. It was a high, thin keening that broke into a wet gag.
But the bone wasn't seated. It was grinding against the shoulder blade. With a roar of pure, unadulterated spite, he twisted the limb. He felt the fragments of the mosaic-shattered shoulder grind together like gravel in a blender.
POP.
The humerus seated itself. The arm finally hung in a way that resembled a human limb again.
He slumped forward, his forehead hitting the cold stone. His breath was coming in short, panicked bursts. He could feel Blood Weave already rushing to the site of the break, the thick, magical ichor beginning to bridge the gaps between the bone shards. It felt like hot lead being poured into his joints.
He looked at his hand—the fingers were still a ruin. The bones in the palm were crushed.
'One... more... thing...'
He stared at his left hand, his vision blurring with exhaustion. He knew—perhaps too well—the intricate, delicate architecture beneath the skin. The hand was a masterpiece of evolution: a dense thicket of tendons, a highway of nerves, and twenty-seven individual bones all working in a perfect, silent symphony.
Now, it was just a bag of gravel.
He was terrified. If he moved the wrong way, if his inexperienced hands—the irony tasted like copper in his mouth—severed a tendon or crushed a nerve, he wouldn't just be healing slow. He would be permanent. He'd be a warrior who couldn't close his fist.
"Just... the minimum," he whispered, his voice a ghost of itself. "Just enough for the blood to recognize the shape."
He laid the mangled hand flat on the cold stone. With his right thumb and forefinger, he began to feel for the metacarpals. Every touch was a fresh lightning strike, but he forced himself to stay clinical. He felt the first bone, snapped and overlapping like a broken pencil.
With a soft, broken sob, he pinched the shards and slid them until they met.
Grind. Click.
His stomach lurched. He moved to the next, then the next. He wasn't a surgeon; he was a desperate man trying to align a puzzle in the dark. He felt the slick, rubbery resistance of the tendons shifting over the jagged bone edges—a sensation so wrong it made him want to retch.
He didn't try for perfection. He couldn't. He just pushed and pulled until the hand no longer looked like a crushed claw, but something resembling a human limb.
"Please," he croaked, looking at the ceiling. "Do the rest."
As if answering his plea, he felt Blood Weave pivot. Now that the furnace in his chest had been quenched and the fire in his arm had been dimmed, the attribute finally found its focus. The thick, tenacious vitality began to flood into the palm of his hand. It felt like a thousand needles of ice and fire stitching the nerves back together, a microscopic miracle occurring beneath the charred, bloody skin.
The transformation was agonizingly slow, but it was happening. The "miracle" was being bought with every ounce of his remaining essence.
With a final, heavy sigh, he rested his back against the cold stone. The sharp temperature crash between his scorched body and the freezing surface made his spine recoil, but it was a mild discomfort compared to the symphony of agony his charred frame was in. There was one last task at hand—the reconstruction of his own face—and Zachary knew it would be the most intimate, most difficult part of all.
So, he decided to breathe.
He remained in a silence that stretched for eternal, personal minutes. His shattered face remained a mask of neutrality and quiet regret. A dark, hollow chuckle escaped his mouth; it burned his ruined throat as it scraped out from his tired lungs.
"Congratulations, Zachary..." he rasped to the empty room. "You're one step closer to hitting bottom."
He was broken, yet devastatingly lucid. Under the crushing stress and the chemical high of the endorphins, his Mind was anchored to the present. Even if he wanted to retreat into those silver memories of the university or the karaoke bar, the door was locked. He was trapped in the now.
"Who said it?" Zachary asked the darkness, his gaze pensive and distant. "I can't really remember... but I know that at times, when I search into my soul, I find it somewhat shattered."
He closed his eye, a pained expression crossing his features. He wondered, 'How long before my soul collapses under the weight of this world?'
Usually, he would have buried these thoughts beneath goals and immediate objectives, but he lacked the energy to build the walls. He didn't have the mental capacity to purge them; instead, he brewed in them, letting his misery take a physical, jagged form.
He was aware of his situation in extreme, clinical detail. Zachary was crying and bleeding under a foreign sky. This world was merciless, and it demanded a heavy price in exchange for the strength to survive it. He wasn't sure if he was ready to pay. But the worst part was that it was no longer his decision.
His goal—his evolution—demanded this price.
"What doesn't kill me... only makes me stronger," Zachary repeated, trying to find some scrap of strength in the words.
But it was fruitless. He knew the actual meaning behind the quote. Nietzsche hadn't expressed it as a sign of triumph or a proof of resilience. He was aware that suffering changed a person, just as a wound never truly heals back to what it was. Scar tissue is tougher, yes, but it is less flexible. It is a deformation.
You stop being yourself.
Trauma wasn't something to take pride in. It only changed you. It could make you rigid and strong... or it could make you strange. Pain, trauma, and suffering only brewed resentment.
"He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster..." A hollow laugh escaped him again. 'I wonder... when I finally go back, after everything is done here... will my family even recognize me anymore?'
A tear threatened to escape his eye, but he refused to let it fall. Zachary instead hardened his spirit, straightening his back against the unforgiving stone.
"Doesn't matter. I'll worry about that when the time comes. At the moment, there's only one thing I can do." His heart beat with a cold, mechanical rhythm. "Either I get busy living... or I get busy dying."
With those final words, he shifted his focus to the one thing he had been ignoring—the one thing that made this nightmare possible. With a tired, ragged breath, Zachary summoned his runes.
Aspect: [Samsara's Prisioner].
Aspect Rank: Sacred.
Aspect Abilities: [Balance Control].
Aspect Legacy: [Repentant Paths].
As he continued reading, he finally saw the words he had ignored during the fight, and a smile dared to bloom through his bloody lips.
Repentant Paths Description: [You're the first who attempts to climb the road of divinity through Enlightenment. Luckily for you, there have been beings before yourself who have stood where now you covet. Walk their Paths, experience their teachings and assimilate their actions.]
A grateful warmth, alien to the freezing Cathedral, spread through his chest. He rested his head against the stone. Just as when he had achieved his premature enlightenment, this was the ultimate validation. His Path was recognized. It was real.
Opening his eye, he continued reading, his heart regaining its rhythm with every glowing line.
Incarnated Realms: [1/7].
Deva Realm: [Thunder Song].
???: Untrodden.
???: Untrodden.
???: Untrodden.
???: Untrodden.
???: Untrodden.
???: Untrodden.
A flash of recognition crossed his gaze. With great difficulty, he calmed the frantic, excited thudding of his heart to study the runes once more. The final characters of the description—those concerning "actions"—were impossibly complex, their original denotation slipping through his mind like sand. And yet, he felt their weight perfectly.
Karma.
That single word, combined with the mention of the Deva Realm, was enough to unlock the architecture of his Way. His lips parted, a quiet chorus of words escaping them, and with each syllable spoken, the runes began to shift, gaining the weight of recognition.
Deva Realm: [Thunder Song].
Asura Realm: Untrodden.
Manusya Realm: Untrodden.
Tyriag Realm: Untrodden.
Preta Realm: Untrodden.
Naraka Realm: Untrodden.
???: Untrodden.
He remained in silence, the cold of the room licking his burned flesh as a long, shaky breath escaped him. He was a prisoner no longer; he was a pilgrim. And the road ahead was paved with his own blood. With a final effort of will, he summoned the last of the runes—the only Path he had truly begun to tread.
[Thunder Song] Legacy Description: "This is the knowledge of Storm God; your soul takes the form of thunderous arrogance."
Zachary stared, his destroyed face betraying no emotion save for the wild, rhythmic trembling of his crimson eye. With a sigh, he finally dismissed the runes and touched the charred, puckered scar on his chest.
He understood the implications immediately. His Legacy was a bridge between two worlds. The Six Paths of Rebirth—the eternal prison of Samsara—were being mapped onto the dead gods of this world.
'But how?' he asked himself, his fingers tracing the ruin of his skin.
The gods of this world were physical realities, each their own Divine Realm. Godgrave, the Storm Sea, the War Realm, currently being consumed by the Dream Realm—they were places one could visit, or die in. The Realms of Samsara, however, were psychological and cosmological states shaped by the weight of one's Karma.
But there laid the problem,they were biological hierarchies: the Devas were literal deities whose beauty and arrogance rendered them incapable of further cultivation, destined to eventually fall back down the cycle once their merit was spent.
The gods of this world, meanwhile, were born of the Flame. Different in authority, yes, but fundamentally equal as incarnations of the same primal source.
'So how can they relate?' The throbbing in his skull intensified. The answer was orbiting him, a dark moon pulling at the tides of his consciousness. He began to backtrack, shifting his focus from the word 'Realm' to the word 'Path.'
Devas... Arrogance... Thunder Song. 'Lightning was the embodiment of pride—falling from the heavens without regard for what stood in its way.' It was the very idea that had kickstarted his transformation at the plaza.
Pride.
"...It's about the transformation of the Soul," he whispered, the revelation turning into understanding.
The Legacy was not about the different Divine Realms, nor about the direct definition of the Realms of Rebirth. Hadn't it been clearly explained to him? It was about the teachings of those realms. The Paths were mirrors.
'In what way do the Realms relate to the gods?'
The Deva Realm was inhabited by literal deities, arrogant and drowned in beauty and attachment. He followed the thread further. The Asura Realm was defined by demigods in constant conflict, fueled by an eternal, burning jealousy against the Devas. He searched his memory for a jealous god, but the trail grew cold.
The Manusya, or Human Realm, was the balance: the struggle between desire and choice, pleasure and pain. It felt like the Sun God's authority, though the Goddess of War stood as humanity's guardian.
The Tiryag, or Animal Realm, was defined by fear and carnal instinct. The Beast God.
The Preta Realm—the Hungry Ghosts—plagued by eternal greed and a void in the belly that could never be filled. The Heart God. The god of hunger and growth... And about As—
'And lastly there is, huh?' Zachary turned his head at an awkward angle. What had he been thinking about?
A sudden chill raced down his spine, leaving him profoundly confused. He began backtracking through his thoughts with clinical precision, from the realization of the truth behind his Legacy to the complex relationships between each god. That was when he found the anomaly. Every time his focus drifted toward the Heart God, a sudden, absolute blank spot appeared in his consciousness.
'What the—?' Thanks to his Aspect Ability and a string of bizarre experiences, Zachary was intimately aware of the inner workings of his own mind. He immediately recognized the strange oddity of this sudden blankness. It wasn't a natural lapse in memory; it carried a distinct sense of ownership.
This mental block was of his own authorship. It was a barrier designed to prevent him from housing something dangerous in his conscious mind. But what type of knowledge could be so volatile that even knowing of its existence was a threat?
Zachary already knew of the Forgotten God and the Daemons. He was aware that knowledge born of the Void—the True Name of Corruption—carried its own weight. But he only knew of its existence, nothing specific. This was different.
"Something else?" he mused aloud, his voice sounding thin against the backdrop of his memories.
The seal had to be relatively recent. He wouldn't have had the mental infrastructure to create something like this until after he obtained his Ability and gained refined control over his mind. That ruled out events from his First Nightmare.
'The Academy?' Unlikely. Aside from Eddard, he hadn't made contact with anything truly esoteric there, and Eddard was just a mundane human.
'Something after arriving in the Dream Realm, then.' Now that he was aware of the void, he began examining the "seal." To call it a seal was a stretch; it was more like a space of deliberate avoidance. It wasn't that he had forgotten the information entirely; rather, a set of instructions in his mind forced him to elude the thought. It was a constant, active redirection—like a word perpetually on the tip of his tongue that his brain refused to let him speak.
But there was a deeper layer. The forced avoidance was triggered by a specific recognition: Pain.
He had linked whatever he was hiding to a traumatic anchor. By tethering the knowledge to a visceral memory, the recoil would be instinctive and immediate. Only one experience in his life carried that kind of weight—the usurpation of the Forbidden Lineage atop the Ashen Barrow.
He must have heard something there—a truth so sharp it alerted his survival instincts. To protect himself from knowledge that could devour him, he had used that trauma to forge a lock. And whatever he was so wary of, it was inextricably linked to the Heart God.
Zachary was surprised by the cold efficiency of his own deduction. He decided to leave it alone. He had done this to himself, and "himself" was the only person he truly trusted in this world.
Maybe when he was stronger, he would dare to think about it. For now, the silence was his only protection. With a shake of his head, he dragged his focus back to the pressing reality of the runes.
The last and most wretched of the Unfortunate Realms: the Naraka Realm. A literal hell, the storehouse of all suffering and concentrated hatred. A hateful god... that was not a path he cared to contemplate while sitting in a pool of his own blood. A hollow laugh suddenly escaped him.
"The Spell has no sense of consistency," he muttered, his head swaying with difficulty.
'I completed my First Nightmare by channeling the Overman—the pinnacle of Western philosophy. And now, my Aspect is rooted in Buddhism—the pinnacle of the East. My Aspect Legacy... there are only six paths of rebirth, yet it's trying to force a connection with a seventh deity!'
Zachary barked a pained laugh that died in his throat. His crimson eye snapped wide, fixed on a point in the dark.
"Unless..."
'Six Realms where souls reincarnate... six affinities my soul can emulate... six legacies for the six known gods.' Each thought was a hammer-blow, accompanied by a thundering beat of his heart that vibrated in the hollow of his skull. 'Those six belong to the Wheel of Samsara. They are the eternal cycle. The prison.'
His heart rate climbed, slipping past his control.
'But there is another answer. Enlightenment. Escaping the cycle altogether.' Zachary's breath caught in his raw throat. 'That is the seventh answer... but how? How does the Forgotten God relate to escaping the cycle?'
The question hung in the air, cold and heavy. To be forgotten was to be erased from the record of existence. To achieve Enlightenment was to voluntarily step out of the cycle of being. They were two sides of the same coin:
"Void."
He began to tremble. An uncontained, extreme emotion took root in his heart and refused to leave. It was a feeling so overwhelming that he couldn't even name it, but it sat heavy in his chest, a rising tide that he could no longer suppress. Instead of fighting it, he chose to focus on the mechanical.
The physical ruin that anchored him to this room.
With a pained groan, he forced himself up, leaning his weight against the cold, unyielding wall. At his feet, Midnight Shard remained by the fire, its burning edge pulsing with a hot light that seemed hungry for more of his blood. Turning his face away instinctively, he began to limp toward the far end of the room, toward the faded bronze mirror.
His naked body protested with every agonizing step, his muscles twitching in a state of near-collapse, but finally, he stood before the glass.
The face looking back at him was a nightmare. His left eye was gone, replaced by a dark, wet crater; his right ear was a shredded ruin. With a shaky breath, Zachary used his internal senses to peer beneath the surface. He saw the empty socket and the shards of bone protruding from the skin like broken porcelain. The cheekbone, the zygomatic arch, the temporal and ethmoid bones—a myriad of smaller structures had been turned to dust when the shield nearly sheared his head from his shoulders.
Blood Weave was holding the wreckage together, beginning its slow, arduous labor now that the other fires in his body had been quenched. And yet, Zachary couldn't be sure of the result. Just as with his hand, he would have to guide the ichor himself. He would have to be the architect of his own reconstruction.
A sudden, jarring memory surfaced, and he couldn't help but let out a genuine, raspy laugh.
"Didn't I try to call myself Batman in front of Seishan that night?" he wheezed, the sound echoing hollowly. "I'm still not Bruce Wayne... but I think I can call myself Harvey Dent now."
The joke was a thin shield against the reality of the blade. He gripped the bloodied knife in his right hand and raised it to his face. His empty socket leaked a single, thick tear of blood, while his right eye remained dry—the well of his sorrow finally parched.
The genuine smile vanished like a flickering illusion as the knife inched closer to the raw meat of his cheek. An impassive, cold mask settled over his features, his gaze turning clinical and detached.
'...Thank god this isn't my face.' With a hand that finally stopped trembling, he drove the knife in.