Total silence… then a breath. Not a human breath, but a slow roar, as if the Earth itself were breathing through him. The blood that had flooded everything began to shiver, shrink, then swirl like a red vortex around the body suspended in the void. Inside him, something moved… not flesh, but a consciousness that refused to die.
> "Is this… what they call the end? Or the beginning of a new sin?"
The voice came from inside him, not from his mouth, not from his soul. It seemed as if there were more than one Ashen. One was screaming, the other smiling. The blood wrapped around them, weaving glowing lines that clung to his skin, carving symbols that belonged to no known era. Each symbol was like a cry from a forgotten time, a cry born from pain and blood.
Cold fire began to rise from within him — flames that did not burn the body but reshaped it. His bones shattered, then slowly reformed as if being rewritten. Every part of him was crushed and reborn with a single pulse. Death repeated thousands of times in a single moment.
In the depths of the vortex, he saw himself as a child again, naked, covered in blood. But the blood was not human. It carried a dark shine, a liquid between light and darkness. The child reached toward something… above him was the blood throne he had seen in his old visions. A giant artery hung from it, pulsing as if it were the heart of the world itself.
The child — him — reached out… he did not touch the artery but let it pass through him. The moment of contact felt like the universe screaming.
The void around him collapsed. Red flames poured into his body. A single pulse was heard, announcing the birth of something unlike any human.
> "The truth has been engraved in the blood… not the soul, not the body, but the blood itself became the vessel."
His body exploded in a flash of crimson light. The walls separating him from consciousness, from pain, from his old self, collapsed. Every boundary that separated man from beast, the refiner from the refined, the killer from the victim, was destroyed.
When the darkness faded, he was standing. Naked, breathing slowly in a sea of red ash. His eyes… were no longer human. One eye flickered like a whirl of moving blood, the other dark, like a pit with no bottom.
Everything around him was still — no wind, no sound, no life. Yet he felt the pulse of the world. Every drop of blood in the earth, every living being carrying life inside it, he could hear its echo, sense it, see it.
He raised his head and saw above him the remnants of the giant eyes — now part of him. They no longer looked at him, but through him.
> "Am I… or death?" he whispered, but the echo answered: "You are both."
He reached to his chest — there was no heart, only a cold vortex spinning endlessly.
> "What… what is happening? Where is my heart?"
At that moment, he heard that cold voice he had not heard in a long time — the voice of the Celestial Dao.
> "Congratulations, Ashen. Welcome to the final trial."