There was no path left to walk.
Only echoes beneath ash.
The city had collapsed in upon itself—stone folded inward, bone buried under prayer-scrolls torn from temple doors. Once-mighty pavilions, now reduced to charcoal silhouettes, leaned against each other like dying men too proud to fall alone. The wind carried no sound. Not even the scent of rot lingered. Only memory remained.
But beneath it all, far under the broken altars and burnt wards, something ancient pulsed.
It was not alive.
It was not divine.
It was the Blood Throne.
And it was waiting.
---
Wuqing descended the ruin with no haste, each step bending reality as though the stairwell itself could not agree whether it should carry him or disintegrate. His cloak did not stir, but the floor beneath him cracked with each movement—not from weight, but from rejection.
The temple did not want him here.
The world did not want him anywhere.
But he came anyway.
He existed, and that alone was blasphemy.
---
The chamber of the throne was not carved by hands.
It had bled itself into being.
Walls of flesh petrified by time, veined with old prayers etched in rust. The ceiling trembled with each breath the earth took, though it had not breathed in centuries. No light reached here, yet the room glowed faintly—dim pulses of red, like a dying heartbeat unwilling to stop.
And in the center of it all stood the Throne.
It was not gold.
It was not jade.
It was bone—layered, twisted, fused through rites older than language. A thousand skeletons had been crushed into its shape, their identities obliterated, their final screams devoured and turned into structure.
It pulsed once as Shen Wuqing entered.
As if it recognized him.
As if it remembered something even the stars had long forgotten.
He paused.
He did not bow.
He did not inspect.
He simply watched.
And the throne watched back.
---
Once, it had been a vessel.
A prison for gods.
A resting place for dead saints too dangerous to burn.
The sect had sealed it beneath the city to keep it from being found. But they had also fed it—rituals, sacrifices, memory-laced offerings too old to name. They had believed it a dormant relic.
They were wrong.
The throne had never been dormant.
It had been hungry.
And now, before it stood a devourer with no master.
A creature not of heaven, not of earth.
A wound that learned how to walk.
And the throne pulsed again—pleading.
It did not beg to be sat upon.
It begged to be eaten.
---
Wuqing stepped forward.
Not as a king.
Not as a claimant.
But as one who understood that power was not a reward—it was a consequence.
The moment his shadow touched the base of the throne, the chamber convulsed. Blood long-dried in the cracks of the floor hissed back into fluid, slithering up the legs of the structure like serpents finding home.
The bone wept.
The screams hidden in its marrow began to uncoil.
They poured into the air—not as voices, but as pressure. The weight of generations screamed without breath, shaping the space into something hostile, volatile, sacred.
Shen Wuqing did not flinch.
He ascended the three bone steps leading up to the throne.
Each step awakened a memory not his own.
First step—a war between gods, forgotten even by their names.
Second step—a child sacrificed by a mother who whispered apologies until her throat tore.
Third step—a sect founder consuming her own disciples to remain immortal, then dying screaming anyway.
All of it bled into him.
All of it merged.
He reached the top.
The throne stood before him, its seat curved like a mouth wide open, its armrests carved into screaming skulls that could not blink, only watch.
Wuqing turned.
He sat.
And the world shuddered.
---
Reality twisted.
Not broken—just reconfigured.
As if every rule, every law of cultivation, of Dao, of morality, had been momentarily paused to watch him sit.
Not as ruler.
Not as god.
But as answer.
The throne screamed.
It screamed not in refusal, but in ecstasy.
For millennia, it had waited for something worthy. Something that would not seek to command it. Something that would not cower from its voices. Something that would not beg.
And now, upon its mouth-shaped seat, sat a man who did not ask permission to exist.
He simply devoured the right to be.
---
The throne's screams poured into Wuqing's back.
Not noise.
Not pain.
But insight.
Images blurred through his vision—flash-etchings of wars never written, tombs never opened, rituals so cruel they were buried by the heavens themselves. But more than visions, he felt taste.
He tasted sin, old and perfect.
He tasted origin, untouched by repentance.
He tasted history that had tried to forget itself.
And all of it fed into him.
Not to strengthen him.
But to sharpen him.
The throne did not empower.
It refined.
Every part of him that had once hesitated, every breath he had once wasted on doubt, was stripped.
Every shred of him that still clung to old rules—of enemy, of innocence, of death—was burned.
And what remained…
Was the core.
A devourer without metaphor.
---
Above the earth, the clouds broke.
Not with rain.
But with voidlight.
A pulsing, colorless radiance spread over the sky, revealing to the sects across the continent that something fundamental had shifted.
Beasts trembled in their caves.
Daoists vomited blood in their meditation.
Priests forgot the names of their gods.
And one by one, their spiritual roots began to crack—not shatter, but decay.
Because the very concept of faith had just been sat upon.
---
Back in the throne room, Wuqing exhaled.
His body burned.
Not from fire.
But from transformation.
The throne did not let him rise.
It did not hold him either.
It became him.
The bone coiled into his back, vanishing without scar.
The blood that had once formed its veins now pulsed in his own.
The memories of a thousand years of blasphemy hardened into his limbs.
He no longer sat on the throne.
He carried it.
Not as symbol.
But as organ.
And from his chest, a faint, imperceptible sound echoed—
A heartbeat, formed of screams.
One thousand, compressed into one.
---
Outside, the city quaked.
Ash rose in spirals, coalescing into shapes that neither lived nor died.
The sect's altar split open—not in ritual, but in mourning.
For the throne had been its anchor.
And now, it no longer served them.
It served him.
---
Wuqing walked into the night.
The wind parted.
The stars dimmed.
Not in fear.
But in obedience.
Somewhere in the north, an ancient deity stirred beneath ice.
Somewhere in the east, an emperor cried out in dream, not knowing why.
Somewhere deep underground, the unborn corpse of a god began to bleed.
And in the silence that followed—
The blood throne moved.
Because it had no form anymore.
It had devoured form.
Like the one who now bore it.
Shen Wuqing walked away from the altar, and the very idea of divine right broke apart.
Not in flame.
Not in thunder.
But in a whisper—
One breath.
One throne.
One silence that would never end.