The monolith's scream hadn't ended when the first proctor lunged.
"Containment protocol! Suppress the anomaly—now!"
Professor Li Mei was already moving, her Temporal Echo talent flickering to rewind the air pressure around Xia Rou, trying to buy seconds for the military detail stationed at the ceremony's edge. Ten elite guards in ether-sealed exosuits burst through the side doors, neural stunners humming, suppression fields deploying in a shimmering dome.
"Student Xia! Stand down! That's an irregular trigger—you could destabilize the entire zone!"
But Xia Rou wasn't listening.
She wasn't even there anymore.
The crimson-black veins from the shattered monolith crawled up her arm like living tattoos, burrowing into her skin. Her scarred knuckles split open, not bleeding red, but spilling threads of void-black fire that smelled of sulfur and raped innocence. The D-rank Unyielding Spark ignited first—a pathetic flicker in the history books, but here it was fuel for the inferno.
In her mind, the contract sealed itself fully. Zhou Ling's voice—no, the thirteen devils' chorus—whispered like lovers in the dark:
*They are close. Military Criminal Detention District, Sublevel 4. Cells 17 through 21. The scarred one with Brutal Strength leads them still. Go, child. Carve your name in their screams. And remember—after them, the Zhao rot awaits.*
Xia Rou's eyes—once brown and weary—flared with inverted crosses.
She remembered everything now. Not just the fire, the pain, the wet violation that had torn her world in two. She remembered *names*.
Jiao the Doorbreaker. Wei the Brute. The laughing twins, Lan and Shen. The quiet one, Gao, who had forced her mouth until she swallowed her own vomit. And the leader, scarred Kang, who had lit the match while calling her "a good little fuck-toy."
Her lips curled—not in a smile, but a snarl that split her cheeks.
The suppression dome clamped down. Neural stunners fired, bolts of psychic lightning arcing toward her chest.
Xia Rou raised her hand.
[Original Sin: Rift of Hatred]
Space didn't tear—it *unzipped*. A jagged maw of black-red void yawned wide enough to swallow the entire podium, edges lined with teeth of writhing shadow. The air howled as it sucked in chairs, holoscreens, the nearest proctor's arm—severing it at the elbow before he could scream.
Professor Li Mei's rewind talent caught a fragment of time, pulling the dome back two seconds. "No—evacuate the hall!"
Too late.
Xia Rou stepped into the rift. It sealed behind her with a sound like a thousand necks snapping.
The ceremony hall was left with a crater twenty meters wide, walls weeping black ichor, and thirty-two teenagers staring at the spot where their classmate had just become a hole in reality.
**Military Criminal Detention District, New Beijing Understructure**
**October 18, 2040 – 09:19 a.m.**
The detention district was a fortress within a fortress: neutronium walls etched with suppression runes, patrolled by Level 80+ wardens with anti-awakener talents, and a central AI core that could flood the levels with neural gas in 0.3 seconds.
Cells 17 through 21 housed the worst of the worst—awakened lifers too dangerous for public execution, kept alive for "interrogation yields" on unregistered guilds.
Kang—the scarred leader, now 52 and bloated from synth-meals—lounged on his bunk, picking at a nutrient bar. His Brutal Strength talent kept him alive despite the neural dampeners; he dreamed of the old days, the raids, the "entertainments." Jiao snored in 18, the twins played cards in 19 and 20, Gao meditated in 21—still quiet, still haunted by what he'd done to that little girl years back.
The alarms didn't blare.
The rift opened in the center of the corridor like a wound in God's eye.
Xia Rou stepped out.
No longer the scarred fifteen-year-old. The contract had remade her: skin pale as ash, veins pulsing with devil-script, hair floating like smoke from a pyre. Her academy uniform hung in tatters, revealing glimpses of armor woven from the souls of the damned—translucent faces mouthing silent pleas where flesh should be.
The wardens reacted first. Twelve of them, ex-military with A-rank suppression fields, raised void-lances. "Intruder! Code Black—"
[Original Sin: Despair's Grasp]
Black chains erupted from Xia Rou's shadow, not as bindings, but as *extensions* of her will. They didn't pierce the wardens—they *inverted* them. One warden's skin peeled inward, folding him into himself until he was a screaming sphere of meat the size of a basketball. Another's eyes burst, replaced by mouths that chewed their way out through his skull. The third tried to activate his panic rune; the chain wrapped his tongue and yanked, pulling his entire digestive tract out through his mouth in a steaming rope.
Screams echoed. The AI core detected anomaly and initiated gas flood.
Xia Rou inhaled.
The vents reversed. Green neural toxin poured *into* the system, corroding circuits, melting the core from the inside. Sparks flew as the lights died, backup generators whining to life—only to explode in chain reactions, showering the corridor in shrapnel that she ignored, her skin turning the metal to vapor on contact.
She walked to Cell 17.
Kang was pressed against the plexi-shield, face pale. "Who the fuck are you? Guard! Get me out—"
The shield didn't shatter. It *liquefied*, dripping like candle wax, splashing onto the floor where it ate through duracrete.
Xia Rou stepped inside. Her voice was calm, layered with thirteen devils' whispers: "Do you remember the little girl? The one you called 'fuck-toy'? The one whose mother you made watch while you broke her open?"
Kang's eyes widened. Recognition hit like a gut punch. "Y-you... no. That slut's been dead for years. Burned up good."
She smiled. It was the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen.
[Original Sin: Echo of Violation]
The cell filled with ghosts—not illusions, but *replays*. Ethereal hands—Kang's own, from that night—grabbed him, stripping his jumpsuit, forcing his legs apart. Phantom cocks, thick and unrelenting, rammed into him from every angle. He felt the tear, the burn, the slap of flesh, the grunts in his ear. But worse: he felt it as the girl had—small, helpless, the world narrowing to pain and shame.
He screamed, thrashing, but the ghosts held him down. One forced into his mouth until he gagged on spectral bile. Another flipped him, pounding from behind while a third violated the wound. They rotated, just like that night, laughing his own laugh back at him.
Xia Rou watched, unblinking. "Feel it. Every second. For her. For your 'entertainment.'"
When the echoes faded, Kang was a sobbing wreck, bleeding from every orifice, mind fractured. He crawled toward her feet. "P-please... mercy..."
She knelt, stroked his scarred cheek with a burning finger. "Mercy? You burned her family while she crawled through fire."
His eyes. She pressed her thumb into one, twisting until it popped like a grape. Then the other. He howled.
Then she *devoured*. Not his body—his memories. His soul-fragments of that night poured into her, fuel for the hate. Kang convulsed, aging decades in seconds, skin sloughing off until only a desiccated husk remained.
She left it twitching and moved to the next cell.
Jiao the Doorbreaker tried to activate his spatial talent through the dampeners—weak rifts flickering open like dying fireflies. Xia Rou walked through them, letting the voids chew at her edges before sealing them with a thought. She dragged him out by the throat, chains wrapping his limbs, pulling until joints popped. "You opened the door to hell," she whispered. "Now walk through it."
She inverted his spatial core. His body folded into higher dimensions—limbs twisting through impossible angles, ribs piercing lungs from inside out. He begged in gurgles as his intestines unraveled into four-dimensional loops, strangling his heart. She made him watch his own entrails knot before snapping his neck with a casual flick.
The twins, Lan and Shen, huddled together in 19, the old camaraderie shattered. "We—we didn't mean— it was Kang's idea!"
Xia Rou laughed—the sound of shattering glass and children's cries. "You competed. Who made the 'little one' scream loudest."
[Original Sin: Mirror of Twins]
The cell became a hall of mirrors, each reflecting the other twin's worst acts. Lan saw himself raping Xia Qing, felt the girl's futile kicks; Shen felt Lan's hands on their mother, the old woman's pleas turning to gurgles. But twisted: they felt it *as each other*, bodies swapping violations in an endless loop. Lan gagged on what Shen had done to Xia Rou; Shen bled from the phantom tearing Lan had inflicted on the mother.
They clawed at their eyes, screaming each other's names, until Xia Rou shattered the mirrors with a clap. Shards embedded in their skin, growing like cancers, blooming into flowers of black fire that ate them from the inside. They died fused together, faces locked in mutual accusation.
Gao, the quiet one in 21, didn't fight. He knelt, head bowed. "I... I regret it. Every night. The girl—the blood in her mouth—"
Xia Rou paused. For a heartbeat, pity flickered, drowned by the devils' chorus. "Regret doesn't un-fuck her throat. Doesn't bring back the ones you snapped."
She didn't chain him. She made him *relive*. Forcing his own talent—D-rank Mind Echo—against him, replaying the moment he choked her until she blacked out, but now *he* was the child, small and breaking. He vomited memories, reliving the bile, the tears, the utter violation of self.
When it ended, he was catatonic, rocking. Xia Rou placed a hand on his forehead. "Tell the void you serve now."
[Devour Soul]
He arched, screaming as his essence unraveled into threads she wove into her armor—another translucent face mouthing silent apologies on her shoulder.
The facility was collapsing by then. Walls buckling under void pressure, wardens' corpses animating as low-level servants under her command—puppets with hollow eyes, dragging the dying to pyres she ignited with a snap. The accelerant from that night? She summoned it from memory, dousing the cells, the guards' stations, the evidence vaults. Flames roared, black and hungry, consuming records, alibis, the last shreds of the men's humanity.
She walked out through a fresh rift, the detention district folding into a pocket dimension behind her—a screaming tomb, eternally burning.
Server-wide alert, delayed by five minutes:
[Anomaly Event: Sublevel 4 Breach. Casualties: 187. Perpetrator: Unknown EX-rank Entity.]
[All zones on lockdown. Calamity Echo Detected.]
Word traveled faster than light in the Calamity Era—whispers through guild nets, emergency pings to council seats, black-market feeds buzzing with grainy rift footage.
By noon, the Zhao Clan remnants knew.
In the shadowed spire of Zhaohold Citadel—last bastion of the ancient bloodline, perched on the edge of the Fractured Himalayas—the council chamber boiled.
Grand Elder Zhao Tian, 412 years old through thrice-replaced bodies, slammed his cane so hard the ether-crystal table cracked. "A *child*? Some devil-tainted street rat awakens with our ancestor's bane and the first thing she does is *slaughter* a military lockup? And now she mouths off about *us*?"
A holographic feed played on loop: Xia Rou's emergence from the rift, her armor of screaming faces, the casual way she'd announced to a surviving warden (before devouring him): "Next? The fucking Zhao family. Every root. Salt the graves."
The room—twenty elders, five half-ancestors, and Zhao Hu's last direct descendant, a sharp-eyed youth named Zhao Lei (Level 120, S-rank Shadow Sovereign)—erupted.
"Do they think we're *soft*?!" Zhao Lei snarled, his shadow coiling like a serpent around his chair. "We survived the Devourer King! We *fed* the Abyss Sovereign our own blood to resurrect him! And now this—some contract whore with Ling's stink on her—dares invoke the old vendetta?"
Elder Zhao Mei, the clan's lorekeeper, traced bloodline runes on her palm, eyes glazing as she communed with ancestral shades. "The resonance... it's her. The Devil Queen's echo. The contract calls for our extinction. Again."
Grand Elder Tian's face twisted, veins bulging black. "We bent knee to the Three Calamities once. Buried our pride under treaties and Equity Acts. Let the military neuter our awakenings. Hid like rats while the world rebuilt on *our* broken backs!"
The chamber thrummed with killing intent. Shadows thickened, pooling on the floor like oil. One elder's talent misfired, cracking a window—outside, the Himalayan winds howled as if in sympathy.
Zhao Lei stood, his form elongating into something less human. "No more hiding. No more 'fragile peace.' We awaken the old arrays. Call in the blood-debt favors from the frontier guilds. Flood the nets with bounties on this Xia bitch and anyone who smells of devil-fire."
Grand Elder Tian nodded, his voice a rasp of ancient hate. "And if the military interferes? Or that ghost of Zhou Jun stirs?"
Lei smiled, teeth sharpening. "Then we remind them: The Zhao bloodline didn't birth the Abyss Sovereign by being merciful. We boil it."
Alarms pinged—scouts reporting rift anomalies along the clan borders. Shadows stirring unbidden. Devil whispers in the vents.
Another Calamity was igniting.
Not from the old ghosts.
From the new.
In the void between realms, Zhou Ling's thirteen eyes opened, watching her contract's vessel with something like maternal pride.
*Burn them, child. Burn them all.*
And far below, in the hells where echoes never die, a crimson-black seed pulsed faster.
The cycle wasn't breaking.
It was accelerating.