The dungeon sat in the northern reaches of the Blood Moon Empire.
What filled it, the starved, savage, scarred, blood-hungry. Sinners without number, crammed into stone cells and left to rot.
Some had been thrown here for genuine crimes. Others for something far simpler.
Poverty.
In this world, poverty was a crime.
Deep in the dark, a young man pressed his back against the wall. He held himself upright by fingertips alone.
His lips barely moved.
"Once a sinner, a sinner for eternity." The words came out barely above breath. "One month before the exile grounds. Is this truly what awaits Yang Ye…"
The continent on which he lived bore the name Tianjī, Heaven's Design. A vast land ruled by a single law: the strong prevail. And in the Blood Moon Empire, which occupied its southern domain, that law ran deeper than most, worship of force flowed in the people's blood, and its hierarchy was carved in stone.
At the very bottom of that hierarchy: the sinners.
Two sayings described their existence better than any decree ever could.
"Once a sinner, a sinner for eternity."
"A sinner will die. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps the day after."
Yang Ye wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth. He was reaching for a patch of floor to sit and rest when the door of his cell crashed open.
The young man in white was lean, tall, and contemptuous. He looked at Yang Ye the way a person looks at something scraped from the sole of a boot.
"Sinner #176,842, Yang Ye. You will enter the Grand Cage tomorrow."
Until that moment, Yang Ye's eyes had held only fear, habituated fear of a creature that has learned to keep its head down.
Then the words registered.
He could not contain what rose in him.
"What? The Grand Cage again? I was in the Grand Cage today. Today. The rule is five days' rest between entries, five days. That is the rule."
The Grand Cage.
Two words that drained the color from every sinner's face the moment they were spoken.
For the sinners, it was a death sentence handed out in rotation.
For the wealthy of the Blood Moon Empire, it was a leisure activity.
The mechanics were simple enough. At dawn, no fewer than five hundred sinners were flung into an enormous iron enclosure. By dusk, only one hundred would walk out alive. The remaining four hundred were to be eliminated, by each other, by exhaustion, by whatever means the cage provided.
Five hundred in. One hundred out.
One in five survived.
Which meant that every survivor had, on average, killed four people before the sun went down.
The audience, nobles and officials who had paid handsomely for their seats at a distance from the cage, watched from above. They reclined with beautiful women in their arms, lifting cups of wine and picking at plates of fruit, and they observed the creatures at the very bottom of the world rip each other apart for the right to keep breathing. Entertainment. Nothing more than that.
But Yang Ye had survived the Grand Cage today. Hours ago. His body still bore the proof of it. And now this white-clad steward stood in his doorway telling him he had to go back tomorrow?
He could not understand it. Did Steward Feng Wen harbor some grudge?
The thought of returning to that place sent a shudder through him.
He never finished the shudder.
Feng Wen moved.
Swift as a white wolf.
"A lowly sinner, and you dare show me disrespect."
The kick connected with Yang Ye's skull with a force that should not have been possible from a standing position. It was not merely painful. It was the kind of blow that finishes things.
The sound was a single flat crack.
Yang Ye's thin body struck the dungeon wall and did not move again.
Feng Wen stood over what remained. The boy's breath still came, faint, threadlike, but present. The steward gave a small shake of his head.
"Sinners, twenty percent of my strength and this one still won't die. Cheap life." He turned toward the door. "Tomorrow's Grand Cage will settle the matter."
Had he accidentally killed Yang Ye tonight, the punishment would have amounted to a brief scolding. He walked out wearing his contempt like a well-fitted coat and moved on to the next cell.
Half an hour passed in the dark.
Then Yang Ye moved.
He turned himself over on the stone floor, inch by agonizing inch, until he lay on his back staring up at nothing. His eyes were mapped red with broken vessels, and something else entirely lived inside them now. Something that had not been there before the kick.
"Feng Wen."
His voice came out stripped down to its bones.
"If the day ever comes that I shed this sinner's skin..."
He stopped. Drew a breath.
"I will split you into ten thousand pieces."
A pause.
"No."
"Not enough."
"Ten thousand pieces would not be enough. I don't just want to split you, I want to eat your flesh. Drink your blood. Leave nothing of you behind. Your bone, your ash. Even the memory of your name."
In the black and rotting dark of that cell, Yang Ye's voice climbed into something that no longer resembled a human sound. It was the scream of a thing dragged past the edge of pain and deposited somewhere beyond it, feral and blazing and utterly without limit.
The one who had kicked him, Feng Wen, held the title of dungeon steward. His primary occupation, carried out with tireless enthusiasm, was the beating of sinners. Yang Ye's hatred for this particular man had deep roots. It had accumulated across more mornings than he could count. It had weight and texture and a specific shape.
It was hatred the depth of the sea.
Then the voice arrived.
It came from nowhere. It came from everywhere. It landed in Yang Ye's ears with the resonance of something ancient, something that had existed long before this dungeon, long before this empire, long before the very concept of sinners had been invented to justify men like Feng Wen.
"Weak, Inferior, foolish human." The voice was old, and unhurried, and utterly unmoved by its surroundings. "Do you want to survive? Do you want… power?"
Yang Ye's body went rigid.
But his mind was already burning. Fury had taken the wheel, and fury did not yield to surprise.
He roared his answer at the ceiling.
"I want power. I want it. Yes... I want it."
The ancient voice offered no reaction to his tone.
"And what ability do you possess that would cause me to grant it? What could you possibly offer? What is there about you that would make me choose you, of all things, for this?"
Yang Ye's eyes went still.
"What special ability do I have. What could I offer."
Something surfaced from beneath the fury.
The ferocity in his expression did not soften. It expanded, into something larger than rage, something older and stranger and more animal than anything a name like "rage" could contain.
"I can devour."
He said quietly.
"I, Yang Ye, can devour. I can consume anything. I can swallow a man whole, flesh, bone, breath, every last piece of him, while he is still alive."
The scream beneath the words carried everything: every humiliation, every day of surviving what should not have been survived, every body that the world had tried to destroy and failed. Grief and madness had been alloyed in him for so long that they could no longer be separated into their original elements.
The ancient voice fell silent.
A long moment held in the dark.
When it returned, its pace had changed, measured now, deliberate, the cadence of something turning an unexpected thing over in its hands and finding it genuinely interesting.
"Devour… hmm.. A rather peculiar ability." Another pause. "Then I shall give you what you ask for. I grant you true power, and with it… desire."
True power, and desire.
The words kept moving through him long after the voice went quiet. A stone dropped into still water, rings spreading outward, finding no edge to stop against.
Then something blazed into existence behind his eyes, or perhaps inside his chest, several characters carrying the smell of blood, scorched into the surface of his mind:
"Heaven-Devouring Art."
"What is this?"
"This is…"
A cultivation technique.