He heard nothing.
No screams of beasts, no sound of his blood, no roar of the earth.
Everything was silent...
But the silence was not peace—it was a living thing crawling toward him.
Then the silence turned into a voiceless roar, a roar with no sound, yet it pierced through his being as if it came from inside his own bones.
The ground beneath him shattered, and the arena split open like a hungry mouth devouring everything above it.
Ashen fell.
But he did not fall into darkness... he fell into himself.
The wind around him was liquid blood, flowing as if it were alive.
The sky was a cage of bones,
and the horizon broke apart like a mirror smashed by an angry hand.
He saw hundreds of copies of himself colliding in the void — each one carrying his face, but all of them were insane creatures:
laughing, screaming, tearing their own flesh with their nails, and devouring each other with animalistic madness.
Each of them represented a fragment of his soul.
Pain, fear, anger, pride, hatred, longing...
All had turned into bloody beings breathing his own essence.
He screamed, and his voice echoed through the nothingness:
> "What is this place?!"
And the answer came like a storm of voices, speaking as one, flat and cold as if the world itself replied:
> "This is your body, Ashen... and this is your soul."
The copies stopped fighting.
All of them turned toward him at once.
Hundreds of red eyes opened together, their gaze cutting through his bones.
He felt the entire existence collapsing toward him — everything trying to enter him,
as if the world itself wanted to devour him from within.
His head exploded with pain beyond words.
It was not physical pain... it was the pain of being reborn against nature.
Fragments of his consciousness scattered like glass shards stained with blood.
Every memory... every feeling... every moment he had lived was crushed inside a whirlpool of madness.
The blood in his veins ignited.
His bones ground together with the sound of metal being crushed.
His skin cracked, and from the cracks grew claws, fangs, and small eyes opening all over his body.
He was no longer a body.
He was a living massacre breathing pain.
He reached for his face... but found no face.
He found something moving, twisting, and breathing in its place.
The space around him trembled.
The two giant eyes appeared again — wider than the sky itself.
One above, one below.
One watched his body, the other his soul.
Eternal beings staring at him as if he were a failed experiment being rewritten.
To them, Ashen was nothing but something being reshaped.
He raised his head with difficulty, his breath breaking like an animal's dying gasps,
his eyes burning with a madness he had never known.
> "I won't let you devour me..."
But a voice inside him laughed — a quiet, flesh-peeling laugh:
> "It has already begun."
"Give in, Ashen. There is no fate for insects in this world. Only brutality rules and reigns."
"Brutality is the sacred king and the iron law of this world."
"Only by drowning and dissolving in it will you live."
"Submit, Ashen."
"Submit."
Blood rose from the ground.
It moved with a hidden will, swirling upward, forming arms that wrapped around his body.
Each arm left behind traces of fire and screams,
as if it erased his humanity bit by bit, writing a new code of madness in its place.
The pain was not only physical, but deeper...
The pain of separation from himself.
As if his soul was torn from his bones,
and his body became a strange being moving on its own.
Then another voice whispered, not from outside but from the depth of his own blood:
> "This is the true beginning of the trial of body and soul."
"Your body will forget that it is yours."
"Your soul will fade into absolute savagery."
"Only by embracing madness will you survive."
At that moment, the copies began climbing onto him.
One grabbed his face and screamed:
> "You are the reason for our weakness!"
Another drove its fingers into his chest:
> "You left us to die!"
A third laughed, licking the blood from his wounds as it whispered:
> "Didn't I tell you pain is beautiful?"
"Only through savagery will you live."
"Weakness is sin, and mercy is an unforgivable crime."
"Only through brutality and madness can we rule and dominate."
He tried to push them away, but each time he struck one aside, another crawled out from within him.
The void itself was birthing them endlessly.
Then he heard his own voice coming from their mouths.
All of them were speaking in his tone,
all of them shouting the same sentence, at slightly different times, like broken echoes:
> "I am Ashen! I am Ashen! I am Ashen!"
Until he no longer knew which one was real.
Which of them was the first to scream?
He felt his mind separating from his skull,
his brain melting and reshaping into something that was no longer human.
He began to laugh... without knowing why.
His laugh came out broken, then turned into a growl, then into a beast's roar.
The blood on the ground responded to his voice, trembling as if it were a creature dancing.
He laughed harder...
until he realized that the blood was laughing with him.
Time stopped moving.
Or maybe he just no longer understood what time was.
The entire space shrank into a wall of flesh pulsing around him.
Faces fell from it, smiling at him, then melting into his skin.
He realized he was inside something like a cosmic womb — a womb of blood and madness.
He could hear massive heartbeats echoing like deep drums inside his bones.
With each beat, something new was born inside him...
an extra bone, a new eye, or an unfamiliar desire to kill.
> "You are no longer human…"
The voice whispered from deep within his skull.
"You are the call of silence… the will that devours light."
"You are absolute brutality, Ashen."
He saw something emerge from his chest — a thick red thread pulsing like a living vein.
Each pulse sent out a wave of hatred,
as if rewriting the meaning of his existence.
Everything that was Ashen shattered.
Everything he would become began to form.
The two eyes above closed halfway, slowly, as if watching a birth.
The blood of the earth rose around him in a sacred whirlpool.
From within it, the arms turned into human-like shapes — faceless, soundless,
worshiping him in complete silence, bowing as if a new being was being born.
His inner voice tore into a thousand fragments,
then all merged into one word that escaped his lips without him realizing:
> "I want… to see blood."
The whirlpool stopped suddenly.
Everything froze.
The eyes, the copies, the earth, the sky... even the air turned still.
And in that moment, there was nothing in the world but Ashen — and the body that was no longer his.
The blood around him exploded, rising into a red pillar piercing the void.
From within it, the Savage Intent was born.
Not from his body,
not from his soul,
but from something deeper — from his very existence.
It had no shape, no sound, no meaning.
But it was real.
It was like an idea born from nothing, carrying the taste of pure madness.
> "I am you,"
the intent said.
"And you were me from the very beginning."
He looked at it... it had his face, but without features.
Inside it moved his old faces — faces of pain, of fear, of those he loved and those who were killed.
It reached out; it wasn't a hand, but a living desire.
When it touched his chest, every sound in the universe stopped.
Then it spoke in a voice he heard through his blood:
> "The human is gone. The beast has begun."
And the silence exploded.
Ashen came out of himself like a creature shedding its old shell.
Nothing remained of his body but evaporating blood.
In its place stood something else — motionless, breathless, with no light in its eyes...
but the earth itself trembled beneath its feet.
The Savage Intent had been born within Ashen.
But was it a blessing or a curse?
Would he remain the same Ashen who sought vengeance with an unyielding will?
Or would he become a wild beast driven only by instinct?
And had this trial truly ended?