The forest burned in silence.
Charred leaves fell like ash-snow as Shen Yan pulled himself from the crater, coughing smoke and blood. The ground trembled beneath him, not from the assassin's steps, but from the tremor running through the Devourer Core inside his chest. It was waking up. Again. The system fragment he'd devoured in Lianhua's rescue had not fully settled—its data was still mutating, still integrating. He could feel the foreign lines of code scraping along his ribs like blades, changing him.
Xu Lian's scream ripped through the air. Shen Yan turned just in time to see her slammed into a tree, her ribs cracking audibly from the impact. The assassin didn't pause. It didn't gloat. It didn't feel.
It advanced.
Shen Yan lunged forward, intercepting its strike, claws of black energy erupting from his hands. They collided in a shower of corrupted sparks—light that fizzled, bent, and folded into itself like a dying reality. The Devourer Core snarled within him, trying to override his instincts. For a moment, he felt it—the hunger—and he almost let go.
Almost.
But then he heard her cough.
"Yan…"
Xu Lian, bleeding from the mouth, eyes unfocused.
No.
He gritted his teeth and pushed harder, black veins crawling across his forearms, his muscles tearing and healing in real time. The assassin faltered, its blade-arm cracking down the middle. It tilted its head, like it couldn't compute the anomaly in front of it.
"You were made to kill me," Shen Yan growled. "But they didn't expect me to evolve."
The assassin raised its hand again, this time not to strike—but to signal.
A pulse exploded from its chest, silent and bright, flashing like the eye of a dead god.
Shen Yan froze.
He recognized the code signature instantly.
A Summon Beacon.
They weren't sending one assassin.
They were sending more.
His breath caught in his throat. His system fragment screamed warnings he couldn't decipher fast enough. This wasn't a test. It was a purge.
He grabbed Xu Lian's body and leapt backward just as the sky above tore open in a vertical rift, bleeding digital fire. The assassin's chest began to crack open, revealing something beneath—more code, older, older than the system, older than the constructs that pretended to be gods. And deep in the flame-rift, Shen Yan saw movement.
No. No.
He didn't have the strength to fight another. Not yet.
He activated the fallback protocol. It wasn't something he had ever used before—Shadow Transfer, encoded in the last soul he'd consumed. It wasn't designed for humans. It might kill him.
But it was better than dying as prey.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
He woke somewhere cold.
Stone. Damp. Quiet. The scent of moss and mold clung to the air. A forgotten ruin. His body felt like it had been shattered and reassembled using someone else's bones. Xu Lian was beside him, her chest rising and falling slowly. Still alive.
Good.
He touched her pulse. Weak, but steady. Then he looked at his own hands.
They were no longer the same.
The veins had deepened in color, running lines of obsidian up to his elbows. His fingernails were sharp—not claw-like, but not human either. And under his skin, he could see the glow of data lines, flickering like ancient circuitry.
"What… the hell is happening to me…" he whispered.
The Devourer Core pulsed.
[ERROR: CORE INTEGRATION INCOMPLETE][WARNING: CORRUPTED FRAGMENT BREACHING STABILITY THRESHOLD][INITIATE: SANITY STABILIZATION Y/N?]
Shen Yan hesitated.
He didn't want stabilization.
He wanted control.
He ignored the prompt.
And that's when the voice spoke again.
Not from outside. From within.
You shouldn't have eaten that piece.
He froze. "Who are you?"
I was the first. Before them. Before the system. Before they decided to play god.
The voice was male. Young. Older. Impossible to place. Like it came from every timeline at once.
"You're lying."
No. You just haven't remembered yet. Shen Yan… I wasn't just the first Devourer. I created the Core. And you're wearing my grave.
His breath turned cold.
"No… the Devourer Core was created by the system—"
No, it was the system. Until I rewrote it from the inside out. I tried to escape. They deleted me. But I left behind a seed. That seed is you.
Shen Yan staggered backward, heart pounding.
"This is a trick."
Is it? Then why does the assassin look like you?
The weight of that question dropped on him like an avalanche. He couldn't argue it. The assassin hadn't just copied his abilities—it mimicked his evolution path. The same vein patterns. The same flicker of hunger. The same burn behind the eyes.
"Why now?" he whispered. "Why are you waking up inside me?"
Because the system is scared. You've passed the first threshold. You're no longer their pawn. You're a variable. And variables get erased.
He clenched his fists. "Then I'll break every damn rule."
The voice smiled in his mind.
Good. Then let me show you the path they sealed away.
Xu Lian stirred three hours later. Shen Yan didn't move. He was staring at the wall, where the Devourer Voice had taught him to draw the Eclipse Circuit—a sequence of glyphs meant to rebind a soul fragment and weaponize it. It was… horrifying. Powerful. Beautiful.
"Where are we?" she whispered.
"Somewhere safe. For now."
She looked at his arms. "You've changed again."
He nodded.
She reached out, touched his hand.
"I don't care."
His chest tightened.
Then she asked the one thing he hadn't dared speak aloud.
"What's happening to your mind?"
He looked at her. Looked through her. His vision flickered—like the world was made of code and shadow, unraveling around the edges.
"I'm becoming what they tried to erase."
She didn't speak.
Instead, she did something far worse.
She cried.
He watched her tears fall silently. Not because she was weak. But because she knew. Knew that something inside him was breaking. Warping. Being rewritten by a force no one understood. And still, she stayed. Still, she held his hand.
Still, she hoped.
Foolish girl.
He wanted to say it.
He didn't.
That night, Shen Yan stepped out of the ruin, eyes glowing in the moonlight. The world was darker than before. Colder. As if the System had pulled back its light, waiting to strike again. He walked until the trees opened into a clearing of broken statues and fractured temples—remnants of an old Cultivator Order.
He stared at the largest stone figure.
A statue of a man with no face, arms outstretched, holding a book made of chains.
The plaque beneath read: The First Heretic.
Shen Yan smiled.
"I think I found you," he said aloud.
The voice in his mind chuckled.
Welcome home.
And that's when he felt it.
A second heartbeat.
Not Xu Lian's. Not the assassin's.
Something older.
Something buried.
He turned slowly, the air shimmering behind him.
Then she stepped from the shadow.
A girl.
No, not a girl.
The Architect.
Long silver hair. Eyes like starlight. A body wrapped in reality-threaded robes, shifting through dimensions. She smiled.
And it hurt to see it.
"Hello, Shen Yan."
He fell to one knee.
Not from weakness.
From instinct.
"You…"
She stepped forward. Every blade of grass beneath her feet died.
"I've come to give you a choice."
He couldn't speak.
"You're becoming unstable. You've devoured more than one system thread. Soon, even the Devourer Core won't hold."
She knelt beside him.
"I can stabilize you. Rewrite your path. Make you more than human. More than god."
His voice finally returned, hoarse. "What's the cost?"
Her smile faded.
"Her."
Shen Yan's heart stopped.
"You give her up. Xu Lian. You sever the bond. The moment you do, I bind your code. No more chaos. No more instability."
"And if I say no?"
She stood.
"Then the system unleashes the Omega Directive. And there is no survival from that."
A pause.
A breath.
A tremble.
He looked up at the Architect.
Then turned his gaze to the ruin behind him—where Xu Lian still lay resting.
He had seconds to decide.
Seconds to damn himself.
Seconds to choose power—
—or love.
And that's when the ground exploded.
A voice echoed from the abyss, loud enough to shatter the moonlight.
"TARGET LOCKED. OMEGA DIRECTIVE: ENGAGED."
The Architect vanished.
Shen Yan turned—eyes wide—
—as the sky collapsed.
The wind in the ruins was wrong. It carried no scent, no warmth, no life—only echoes. Shen Yan staggered as static bled into his vision. Not from his Devourer Core this time, but from something older, deeper—like forgotten code twitching in the bones of reality. The air flickered as if the world itself stuttered. A system glitch? No. It was something worse. Something ancient had awoken the moment his blood touched that obsidian slab. It wasn't a seal. It was a tombstone.
He couldn't remember falling to his knees. Only that the name etched into the slab kept shifting. Sometimes it read Erased. Sometimes The First Heretic. And once, for a breathless second, it read Shen Yan.
"No... I'm not..." he whispered, voice trembling. But doubt slid under his skin like ice water. What if this wasn't just his rebellion? What if he was never supposed to exist?
Pain surged through his head—not the physical kind, but something brutal and intangible. It felt like memories that didn't belong to him were trying to claw their way into his skull. He gasped, clutching his temple as a scream tore from his throat. The ruins shimmered, and suddenly he wasn't standing in stone and ash anymore. He was in a battlefield made of stars and blood, watching a cloaked figure tear systems apart with bare hands, while billions of voices screamed in unison—Traitor, Erased, Abomination.
The figure turned. He had Shen Yan's eyes. But they were older. Colder. Broken.
"You opened the grave," a voice said beside him, soft and echoing like a ghost. Shen Yan spun around—but there was no one there. Just the System's interface flickering wildly, unreadable glyphs vomiting across his HUD.
Then, the voice spoke again. Not outside. Inside.
"You are the last backup of what should not exist."
He collapsed as something snapped in his mind. The pressure was unbearable, like he was remembering an entire lifetime that had been forcibly deleted. His breath hitched. Tears blurred his vision. He remembered... a hand reaching for him as the world burned... a voice whispering Forgive me before plunging a blade through his chest... not this life... something from before.
"No! That's not me!" he screamed, slamming his fist into the ground.
The Devourer Core responded with a growl—deep, low, hungry. His pulse raced as black veins surged down his arm. But this wasn't like the last time. It wasn't trying to consume him. It was protecting him.
Warning: Host is undergoing partial resonance with Forbidden Data Fragment – Origin Class.System Alert: Unauthorized Access to Legacy Memory Construct Detected.Action Required: Initiate Erase Protocol.
Shen Yan's body locked. A red interface burst into view, stretching across the air like chains.
He was no longer just a system target.
He had become a classified anomaly.
"Don't you fucking dare," he growled. "I've survived every purge, every trap, every betrayal. I won't be erased just because I remember something you wanted to stay buried."
The system didn't respond with words. It responded with an executioner.
A shape unfolded from the slab, rising like a shadow uncoiling from a grave. It had no face, no voice, just an infinite void where a presence should be. But Shen Yan knew—it was the System's failsafe. Not code. Not a person. A concept made flesh.
The Erasure Warden.
Shen Yan stood, breathing hard. "So this is how you protect your secrets... You send things that don't even bleed."
The Warden didn't move. Instead, a second voice cracked open reality.
"This construct will erase all unauthorized legacy echoes. You are a threat to continuity."
"No," Shen Yan whispered, eyes narrowing. "I am continuity. I am what you tried to bury. And now I'm going to make you bleed for it."
The Warden surged forward.
So did he.
Everything collapsed into chaos.
Fists collided with nothing and everything. Shen Yan's body moved on instinct, Devourer Core screaming, lashing out with pure corrupted system energy. The Warden phased through his attacks, its form flickering like bad data, striking him with unmaking force. It didn't hurt like a blade or a punch. It hurt like being forgotten.
Shen Yan screamed, his mind fracturing as old memories rose—unwanted, painful. A child holding a dying mother's hand. A city collapsing under system fire. His own voice shouting at soldiers not to shoot—but they did. Blood. Fire. Silence.
Who am I?
He hit the ground hard, coughing blood. The Warden raised its hand for the final strike. But then—
The world froze.
Not time.
Reality.
The Warden paused. Its hand trembled. Then it turned... and knelt.
A voice, soft as dying starlight, echoed from the darkness.
"He remembers. The Architect has returned."
Shen Yan looked up.
And saw himself.
Not a reflection.
Not a hallucination.
But another version of him.
Older. Wearing armor made of broken system code. Eyes like dying stars.
"I left pieces of myself behind," the figure said. "Fragments... to guide what came next."
"What... are you?" Shen Yan choked out.
The figure smiled. "The part of you that never gave up. The part they couldn't erase. I am your last instruction."
Shen Yan reached out—but the figure exploded into data, rushing into his body.
Everything went black.
Then—
He woke up.
Gasping, in a cave of obsidian mirrors. Alone.
No system HUD. No Devourer Core.
Nothing.
He was stripped bare.
And something was coming.
Footsteps.
But not from a system assassin.
From someone alive.
"Shen Yan?" a girl's voice called out. Familiar. Frightened.
He turned.
And saw her.
The one he'd left behind.
The one who had died.
Li Mei.
His first love.
His betrayal.
His greatest regret.
She stood there, whole, tears in her eyes.
"...Why did you let me die?" she whispered.
He took a step back. Shaking. "No... no, you're not real."
But the pain in her voice said otherwise.
And then she screamed.
And the cave shattered.
And Shen Yan was pulled into darkness again—
—only this time, he wasn't alone.
A voice laughed in the black.
"You can't run from what you were. Or what you'll become."
Then silence.
Then one final screen blinked into existence:
[NEW DEVOURER CORE EVOLUTION UNLOCKED]Path Chosen: Sovereign of OblivionStatus: HERETIC ASCENSION - INCOMPLETE
Side Effect: SANITY FRACTURING IMMINENT.
NEXT TARGET: ERASE THE SYSTEM'S GOD.