The first thing Mu-ryong registered was the cold.
Not the crisp chill of the Frozen Mountain's training grounds, nor even the damp bite of the imperial dungeons. This was a cold that seeped into the marrow—a void where his qi should have hummed.
His eyes flew open.
White.
A vaulted ceiling stretched above him, carved with pulsing runes that made his skull ache. He tried to sit up—and collapsed instantly, his muscles betraying him like his sect brothers had.
"Ah. It lives."
The voice dripped with amusement. A boot pressed down between his shoulder blades, grinding him into the stone floor.
"Pathetic," the man mused. "And to think the astrologers swore this ritual would summon a warrior."
Mu-ryong's fingers clawed at the smooth stone. His body felt foreign—a puppet with its strings cut. Where his dantian had once burned with the Frozen Mountain's core techniques, there was only...
Nothing.
The boot flipped him onto his back.
Blinding light. A circle of faces peered down at him—men and women in robes of liquid silver, their collars weighted with gemstones that pulsed like living hearts. Behind them, towering stained-glass windows depicted battles against things with too many limbs.
"Can it speak?" A woman nudged his ribs with her staff.
Mu-ryong's lips parted. What came out wasn't language, but a raw animal sound—half-growl, half-whimper.
Laughter echoed through the chamber.
They dragged him through halls that bent wrong.
Curved arches defied physics, their shadows pooling in impossible angles. The air tasted of ozone and spoiled honey—thick with mana that clawed at his qi-starved meridians.
The throne room was worse.
Nobles perched on floating tiers like vultures on branches, their jewels casting prismatic scars across the walls. At the room's heart, a throne of blackened bone pulsed with slow, rhythmic light.
And on it—
The King.
Not a man. Not anymore. His flesh had transparent patches, revealing veins that pumped not blood, but liquid starlight.
Mu-ryong's knees hit marble. The mage who'd dragged him here bowed.
"Your Radiance. The hero from the World of Iron and Blood."
A murmur ran through the court.
"Where is his power?" demanded a noble with peacock feathers woven into his beard.
"Gone," said the mage. "The summoning shattered his core. He's emptier than a beggar's purse."
Mu-ryong's vision swam. The Emperor's face flashed behind his eyelids—that smile as the execution order was signed.
"Liar," he rasped.
The peacock noble backhanded him. Mu-ryong's head snapped back, blood arcing across the pristine floor.
"You dare—"
Magic seized his tongue.
The rune-eyed mage from earlier stepped forward. "Let me explain your situation, beast." Her fingers danced, and the air ripped open.
A vision unfolded:
A moon cracked in half.
Cities swallowed by shadows with teeth.
And towering over it all—a figure with a crown of screaming faces.
"The Demon God comes," the mage said. "Your primitive world's energy might harm it. So we fished you from your execution. Be grateful."
Mu-ryong's laugh was a broken thing.
Grateful?
They'd plucked him from vengeance. Stolen his death. Left him a cripple in a world of monsters.
The King's voice vibrated through the stone:
"Brand him."
They strapped him to a table carved from a single meteorite.
The rune-eyed mage pressed a crystal shard to his chest.
"This will hurt," she lied.
It was beyond pain.
The brand seared through flesh, through soul, through the shattered remnants of his meridians. Mu-ryong did not scream. He'd learned in the Emperor's dungeons—sound only fed tormentors.
When it was over, the mage studied her work:
A nine-pointed star, its edges oozing silver.
"The Mark of the Hollow," she murmured. "It will let you borrow our mana. Enough to stand. To fight. Never enough to resist."
She snapped her fingers.
Feeling rushed back into his limbs.
Mu-ryong lunged—
—and collapsed, the brand burning white-hot.
"Ah-ah." The mage wagged a finger. "The Mark decides when you move."
She tossed a wooden practice sword at his feet.
"Your will start at dawn. Try not to die too quickly."
They locked him in a tower room with windows that showed no ground below.
Mu-ryong sat motionless, tracing the brand.
Then—
A whisper from the Mark:
"...ate their fear..."
He froze.
The voice wasn't his. Wasn't human.
And it was hungry.
Dawn came and he was dragged to the arena.
The iron doors sealed with a sound like a dying man's last breath. No guards. No mage. Just endless black sand beneath a sky of churning shadows.
Mu-ryong collapsed to his knees, clutching his brand as it throbbed like an infected wound.
"Fight or die," it whispered—not to him, but to something inside him.
The sand erupted.
Seven figures rose—all him, all wearing different expressions of agony. The nearest one still had fresh blood dripping from its brand.
"Don't...let it...consume you first..." it gurgled before collapsing into ash.
The second corpse attacked with Frozen Mountain techniques—but corrupted. Its Plum Blossom Strike bent at impossible angles.
Mu-ryong barely raised his arms in time.
CRACK.
The impact shattered his forearm. He screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the sand.
The brand seethed:
"Pathetic. You still fight like you deserve to live."
The corpse's next strike aimed for his throat—
—when suddenly Mu-ryong remembered.
A childhood lesson: "When disarmed, become the blade."
He let the technique hit.
Ribs snapped as he grabbed the corpse's wrist and pulled.
The brand shrieked as it flooded his broken arm with foreign warmth
His bones knit themselves back together wrong, fingers now slightly too long.
By the fourth corpse, Mu-ryong was more blood than man.
His left eye refused to focus. His breaths came in wet rasps. The brand had grown heavier, its whispers now layered with other voices.
The newest attacker moved like Elder Xue.
"You were always the weakest link," it sneered with his own voice, delivering a perfect Frozen Mountain killing stroke—
—directly into Mu-ryong's outstretched palm.
Fingers sank into the corpse's chest as the brand howled in triumph.
"YES. FEED ME THEIR LIES."
The vision came too fast: The awful truth—the corpses weren't copies
They were previous versions of him.
Mu-ryong crawled toward the last corpse, his blackened veins pulsing in time with the brand.
"Teach me," he begged through broken teeth. "How to devour without becoming the meal."
The final corpse smiled—the first expression not of pain, but pity.
It placed a rotting hand over Mu-ryong's brand.
"Then learn the first truth: the hungriest thing here...is you."
The brand screamed as the corpse:
Whispered:
"Swallow your own death first."
The corpse's rotting fingers forced Mu-ryong's jaws wider.
"Swallow," it commanded, as blackened flesh slid down his throat.
The world shattered.
Mu-ryong convulsed as the corpse's essence unmade him:
His skin sloughed off in ribbons of shadow
His ribs cracked open like a chrysalis
The brand screamed as it was consumed by his own flesh
Memories flooded in—not his own:
A younger mage weeping over the first failed hero
The Demon God whispering through its prison seals
Hundreds of identical arenas, each containing a different version of him
The corpse's voice cut through the visions:
"This is what she never told you. The brand doesn't hold power. It holds hunger. And you just ate yours."
Mu-ryong gasped back to consciousness changed:
His left arm was now pure shadow, fingers ending in hooked claws
His brand had inverted—a black hole sucking in the arena's light
His mouth tasted of iron and forgotten screams
The last corpse was gone, but its final lesson remained:
"You are not the first. Only the first to bite back."
The sand began shuddering, grains levitating toward his new void-brand.
Mu-ryong raised his shadow-arm—and the arena obeyed:
Walls melted into liquid darkness
The iron doors screamed open
A path formed from compressed screams of previous heroes
As he staggered forward, the brand whispered its first true secret:
"She fears you now. Because you carry the taste of what made the Demon God."
The words settled into his bones with terrifying clarity. This wasn't just power—it was corruption. The same primordial hunger that had birthed the kingdom's greatest enemy now pulsed beneath his own ribs.
Mu-ryong looked down at his shadow-arm. The darkness rippled in response, forming brief shapes—jagged teeth, screaming faces, the unmistakable curve of moon-carved pillars from the arena.
The inverted brand on his chest pulsed.
"They tried to chain what cannot be chained," the voices murmured—no longer just the brand, but the sand itself, the air between breaths, the echo of his own footsteps.
"Your are the key. The unmaker. The feast."