The blood no longer just flowed.
It had become time itself.
Every wave of blood that pierced his body carried something that was not his: memory.
But it was not human memory, nor even the memory of a sentient creature.
It was the memory of existence when there was no meaning to existence.
Visions began to pour toward him like an endless cosmic flood.
He did not see them with his eyes, but with every part of him.
Every drop of blood in him became an eye, every cell a vessel for an image pulsing with madness.
At first, he saw shadows — faint, distant, moving in deep silence.
Then he began to hear them.
The earth's roar as it was born from fire,
the mountains' screams rising from the womb of planets,
the moaning of galaxies stretching as if giving birth to themselves.
Everything was born through violence.
Every beginning was a massacre.
Even the first light that tore the void was not a birth, but a slaughter of eternal sleep.
Ashen found himself in the midst of this cosmic mixture,
seeing colossal beings emerging from the blood as thoughts emerge from madness.
Beings without names, without boundaries,
their bodies built from the sap of chaos, compressed nothingness, lava, and screams.
Their eyes shone with pure madness,
fighting, reproducing, devouring each other in a scene the mind could not comprehend and the heart could not endure.
He saw the universe born through brutality, not creation.
He saw power define itself through massacre.
He saw the first civilizations — if they could be called civilizations — built on the ashes of the beings before them.
Land made of blood. Sky made of fire.
Mountains moving like beasts, oceans boiling with screams.
Everything breathed violence.
Even the air fed on struggle.
In the middle of this scene, something mysterious appeared.
A massive form beyond description.
It was not a body… but a concept made visible.
Pure brutality.
It was not just a creature,
but the essence behind every death, every desire for control, every intent to crush another.
Its eyes — if they could be called eyes — were lifeless,
yet within them worlds jumped, burning and ending every second.
When it looked at him, Ashen did not feel fear…
but something worse: belonging.
He felt as if he knew this entity.
As if he were part of it,
as if the blood flowing within him was nothing but remnants of this first primal being.
And when the entity reached out its hand, it did not touch Ashen's body…
but his very existence.
At that moment, a wave of images and visions exploded within him:
Wars stretching across galaxies.
Planets erased under the feet of armies of blood creatures.
Civilizations rising and falling in an instant.
Monsters devouring stars as humans devour air.
Blood was everywhere,
but it was not filth or corruption — it was the only logic of survival.
He saw himself among them.
As if he were there, leading one of those armies,
his face covered in blood, his eyes burning with sacred madness.
Everything before him crushed. Everything after him silent.
Then he saw the end.
The corpses piled up into mountains.
The blood gathered to cover the sky.
And at the top, he — or something like him — sat silently,
looking at the eternal ruin as if it were a finished work of art.
Then Ashen understood something he had never understood before:
Brutality is not a deviation from nature; it is nature itself.
Blood is not a sign of death, but a promise of eternity.
What humans call destruction… is actually transformation.
When he realized this,
the visions shook.
The universe he was seeing began to crumble.
The monsters, the ages, the galaxies — all began to dissolve into blood.
He returned to the void.
But he was no longer as he had been.
Something inside him had changed.
The blood in his veins boiled as if it carried the memory of millions of ages.
And as the visions faded,
the giant eyes appeared again.
They were not outside, but deep within his consciousness.
Watching him — his body and soul — in terrible silence,
as if passing final judgment.