Chapter Eighteen — The World That Rejected Him
The sky was a vast, trembling miracle.
For a long time he could only stand beneath it, head tilted back, eyes burning from the unfamiliar light. The wind lifted his tangled black hair, a gentle touch utterly foreign to him. It carried the scent of pine, of wet moss, of things alive.
He stepped forward and the earth did not crumble.
He tasted the air and it did not choke.
He listened—and heard birdsong.
The world beyond the Abyss was a miracle made real.
He walked as one newly born, barefoot upon living soil. The ground was soft, the light warm, the trees green in a way he had never imagined. Yet he moved with the instinct of someone who had never known peace. His eyes scanned every shadow. His muscles remained coiled. Reflexes forged in darkness did not fade in the sunlight.
He did not know it, but he was a giant among ordinary men.
Tall, broad-shouldered, his skin toughened by years of poison and acid baths, his muscles coiled with terrifying potential—he walked like a mountain given shape.
It was inevitable that he would be seen.
A group of villagers spotted him on a forest path—a man with wild hair, cracked skin, amber eyes that glowed faintly in the morning light. To them he was no man at all, but some beast emerging from forbidden lands.
They screamed.
They reached for spears.
He did not understand their fear. He did not understand their words.
He only recognized the raised weapons.
In the Abyss, a raised weapon meant death.
In the Abyss, hesitation was fatal.
They lunged, clumsy and terrified.
He reacted out of pure instinct.
And in the moment of collision, the fragile world of humans shattered before him.
His strength—refined over centuries, hardened by battles against monsters that defied imagination—could not be measured against ordinary flesh. A single push crushed bone. A single strike sent bodies flying like leaves in a gale. Their spears splintered against his skin. Their screams tore through the trees.
When the last villager fell, silence returned.
He stood amid broken bodies and spilled blood, the morning sun gentle upon the carnage.
This was not the Abyss.
But he had acted as though it were.
He looked down at his hands—hands that had learned only to kill.
The sweet wind felt suddenly cold.
It did not take long for rumors to spread.
Villagers whispered of a demon in human shape, a beast that walked upright, a creature from the forbidden Abyss.
"He smashed men apart like rotted wood."
"No blade could cut him."
"Amber eyes—glowing like coals…"
"Not human. Not possible."
Fear grows quickly when watered by blood.
Within days, wandering disciples and martial clans heard the tales.
A beast stronger than a Martial Master.
A monster wearing a man's shape.
A prize waiting to be claimed.
Martial artists seeking fame set out.
Sects hungering for prestige sent their hunters.
Young disciples dreaming of glory whispered his title:
"The Nameless Monster."
He did not know any of this.
He only wandered—fascinated by the color of the sky, the warmth of sunlight on his face, the softness of grass beneath his feet.
He did not seek conflict.
But conflict found him.
They came in groups first—young warriors with shining swords and proud crests emblazoned upon their robes. They struck from the shadows, from treetops, from cliffsides. Their techniques were elegant and deadly, arts passed down through generations.
He had never learned a single martial art.
He did not know what a technique was.
He only had reaction, instinct, strength refined to an unnatural degree.
Blades broke against his skin.
Spears bent in his grip.
Strikes that could shatter stone only made him blink.
He did not want to kill them.
He tried to push them away.
Tried to warn them.
Tried to flee.
But martial pride is a poisonous thing.
And fear is worse.
The more he defended himself, the more monstrous he appeared.
The more he refrained from killing, the more they believed he toyed with them.
And when some hunters did not return, their sects grew furious.
Martial Lords descended from the mountains.
Martial Kings rode in chariots pulled by spirit-beast.
He survived them all.
Not through technique—
but because his body, refined through six pillars of brutal evolution, simply would not break.
Years passed.
Then decades.
The stories twisted.
Some claimed he was a demon born of forbidden cultivation.
Others that he was a beast granted a human form by dark arts.
Still others whispered he was the wrath of the Abyss made flesh.
Temples prayed against him.
Sects vowed to hunt him.
Children grew up fearing the "Abyssal Walker," the "Amber-Eyed Shade," the "Skincracked Fiend."
And yet none had ever spoken to him.
None had ever tried.
They feared too much, and he understood too little.
In time, he learned to hide.
To avoid villages.
To stay deep in forests, high in mountains, away from people who screamed at the sight of him.
His heart, reforged so many times it beat like a thing made of iron, felt something unfamiliar—
a heaviness, slow and dull.
Sadness.
Loneliness.
The terrible realization that outside the Abyss, he still belonged nowhere.
A Myth Among Men
A hundred years after he first left the Abyss, most sects no longer hunted him.
They could not find him.
They had grown wary—or wise.
Two hundred years later, only the oldest masters remembered the battles against the amber-eyed monster.
His story became a tale told around fires.
A warning to arrogant disciples.
A myth.
And by the time he had wandered the world for nearly three centuries, he had become something else entirely—a whisper, a ghost, a legend spoken in awe:
The Nameless One, the Monster Who Could Not Die.