Seven years had passed since Gluttonfang found himself imprisoned within the endless silence of the floating realm. Seven long, quiet, uneventful years. No enemies. No allies. No food other than the silver flowers and roots he had already grown sick of. No sounds, except the eerie lullaby of the singing tree. The floating rocks had not shifted any more than usual. The void above and below remained the same: dark, hollow, eternal.
He had turned ten a few weeks ago. Not that birthdays mattered here. There was no concept of seasons, no sunrise or sunset, no passage of day or night. Only that endless song, haunting and beautiful, whispered through the silver leaves of the singing tree, keeping time better than any clock ever could.
"The flow of time changes life, The despair within you, trifles with mine, Surrounding the air are no clouds in rhyme, Floating above the abyss, for endless time.
Darkness above, darkness below, A silver ray in between which doesn't intertwine. Lazy eyes hidden behind the curtains of horror, If you stare at them, they glare back, Breaking the loop in seven cracks, The power unleashed afterwards, is all mine."
The words had engraved themselves deep into his soul, not through intention, but through sheer repetition. The tree sang this song every time it awakened from its silent slumber, ten minutes after every three and a half hours. Always the same verses. No more, no less. Not a syllable changed. Gluttonfang, in his lonely stasis, had dissected every line, turned each word upside down in his mind, and pondered their deeper meanings as if decoding a divine scripture.
He had learned much over the years. Not just about himself, but about the nature of silence, about how time stretches and warps in a vacuum devoid of interaction. He had entered this realm a beast with ambition. He had now become something more. Or perhaps something less.
He hadn't moved in years. Not because he couldn't, but because he saw no reason to. He had become deeply still, a mountain on a floating rock. He barely blinked. His breathing was nearly imperceptible. Only his mind remained active, and even that had dulled at times.
Gluttonfang had listened to the tree more than anyone ever could. He had watched the shifting patterns of floating rocks a thousand times. He had questioned the silence. He had cursed the stillness. He had turned every possible theory over in his head, only to find himself circling back to the same question:
What did the final stanza mean?
"Lazy eyes hidden behind the curtains of horror, if you see them, they glare back, breaking the loop in seven cracks, the power unleashed afterwards, is all mine."
Over and over again he came to this line.
The curtain of horror. The lazy eyes. The seven cracks. The loop. The power.
It had become a mantra.
And it had become his madness.
One day, without warning, his main eyes opened. Slowly. Without expression. Dull and dark like lakes frozen for centuries. His shoulder mouths followed. The left one murmured, the right one hummed. And together, they began to sing.
His voices sang the tree's lullaby.
It was the first sound he had made in years.
He sat up, bones creaking softly like rusted gates. His tail flicked. His claws gently scraped the rock beneath him, sending faint sparks in every direction. The void around him remained as still and unreceptive as always.
His eyes scanned the surroundings. The silver tree stood tall on its own distant rock, its leaves as crystalline as ever, its bark glowing faintly with that mystical sheen. The other rocks floated in their lazy spirals, unbothered by time or purpose. The song still echoed, hauntingly beautiful.
"The flow of time changes life..."
Gluttonfang finished the line with a bitter smile.
"Yes," he whispered through his true mouth. "It does."
Then he rose. For the first time in seven years, he stood.
His body had subtly changed during his stillness. Not in size, but in texture. His fur was a deeper black now, like a shadow that had sunk into obsidian. His many eyes flickered with a slow-burning fire, each one glowing like a sleeping volcano. His limbs moved with the ease of a beast that had gone beyond physicality.
"What lazy eyes..."
His voice was raspier than before. Drier. But filled with an eerie calm.
He stepped to the edge of his rock. Below him was the abyss. An ocean of nothing. He had stared into it countless times before, trying to make sense of it. Trying to see something. Anything.
It had always been just that. Nothing.
But now, now the words hit him differently. Now, they clawed at his spine.
"Lazy eyes... hidden behind curtains..."
He leaned forward slightly. His snout pointed directly downward. Into the black.
He lifted his clawed hand, index finger extended. Calmly.
"You," he said.
Then he slowly extended his middle finger in its place.
A grin crept across every mouth on his body. A savage, unhinged grin, so wide and toothy it looked unnatural even for a beast.
"I dare. Glare back at me, lazy f**ker."
The words left him as gently as silk floating through the air.
The void responded with a shift.
It was subtle at first. The floating rock he stood on trembled, just slightly. A vibration not felt in years. Then, something colder than space itself brushed against his fur. A chill not of temperature, but of thought. Of gaze. Of something... seeing.
From below, two points of faint silver light emerged. Just dots. So faint they could be mistaken for reflections. But Gluttonfang saw them. He saw them clearly.
Eyes.
Not his. Not imagined.
Eyes. Lazy. Wide. Glowing. And half-lidded like someone peeking through a cracked curtain.
And then, they glared back.
He did not blink.
The abyss cracked.
A soundless rupture echoed across the dimension. Not in noise, but in sensation. The very rules of the realm bent. One crack. Then two. Then five more. Seven.
Each crack appeared like thin silver fractures across the sky, the rocks, the very fabric of reality. A ripple surged upward, from the abyss below to the floating islands above.
The silver tree sang louder than ever before. Its melody became wild. As if in ecstasy. Or terror.
Gluttonfang didn't move.
The cracks gleamed. Reality twisted.
A spiral of light began to form beneath him. Not a portal. Not a door. A whirlpool of space itself. As if the realm was unraveling in response to his defiance.
And then he laughed.
Every mouth laughed.
He had broken the loop.
The loop that held this place in stagnation.
The loop that repeated every 3.5 hours.
The loop that only the singing tree kept at bay.
He had cracked it open.
He stared into the eyes in the abyss again.
"I'm still here," he whispered. "Seven years, and I'm still here."
The eyes did not vanish.
They blinked.
And then vanished.
The cracks remained.
The spiral deepened.
And for the first time, he saw something beyond the silver tree.
A stair.
Made of silver bones. Floating. Twisting upward into the sky above.
Gluttonfang took a deep breath.
He didn't know where it led. He didn't care.
He had been stuck for too long. Now, he would move.
And as he stepped toward the rising spiral of bone, the singing tree gave one final cry. A verse not heard before. A new line.
"The beast who dares to glare at fate, shall climb the stair, and seal his state."
Gluttonfang grined. It was finally his ticket to the exit.
Step by step, he climbed. A single glowing stair stretched before him, the next revealing itself only once he stepped upon the last. The rest of the world—the floating abyss, the humming rock-islands, the dark canopy of forever—faded behind him as the stairs stretched endlessly into the black.
Ten minutes passed.
Thirty.
An hour.
Two.
Four.
Seven.
Still, the stairs stretched on, cruel in their simplicity. There was no handrail, no texture, no wind. Only endless motion. Each time Gluttonfang's paw lifted, his weight grew heavier. He couldn't stop. He wouldn't stop.
After years of stagnation and stillness, this movement — even if it was blind, even if it was meaningless — was a freedom he hadn't known he craved. The moment he took the first step, something had clicked inside him, something old, something primal. It screamed: *Climb.*
So he did.
Days turned into weeks.
Weeks turned into years.
Years bled into decades.
Ten... twenty... thirty years?
His bones didn't age the way mortals did. He was Order 5. His flesh would last. But his mind? His soul? They were not immune. The weight was no longer just his body's. It was the crushing gravity of a world that mocked motion, a staircase that demanded pain.
Every step felt like dragging a mountain with his shoulders. His claws scraped against the shimmering stairs, leaving no marks. His breath had long turned silent. His mouths—the ones on his shoulders, hips, even the hidden one under his ribcage—had grown dry and silent. There was no conversation left in him. No jokes, no madness, no hunger.
Just the climb.
Behind him, the abyss had darkened further. No longer simply an endless void, it had... changed.
Something stirred.
Deep beneath the pathless depths where no rock floated, where no tree sang, a figure shifted. Massive. Ancient. Timeless.
It opened its eyes.
The beast resembled a panther in form alone. Yet there was nothing feline about it. Its four legs were like the limbs of elephants, layered in heavy muscle and plated bone. Its tail arched like a scorpion's, pulsing with toxin made of shadowstuff. Its eyes glowed a sickening, pearlescent white. Around it flowed a fog darker than any night, blacker than any void.
The aura of the creature wasn't loud. It didn't roar. It didn't announce itself. It simply *was*, like gravity, like hunger, like despair.
Its body was a shadow given form, its features outlined only by the faintest, eerie silver glow that traced the edge of its massive body like moonlight glinting off a blade in the dark.
It had been asleep.
For eons, it had slept.
Until now.
Something had awakened it.
Or rather, *someone* had dared to glare into the abyss, middle finger raised high, and spit defiance into the darkness.
The creature's white eyes blinked once. A tremble went through the void.
It had been called many names by those who had seen it in glimpses.
"The First Sleep."
"Echo Panther."
"Wyrm-Without-Words."
But in truth, no one knew what it was. Not even itself. It was a force. A curse.
And it was awake now.
*---*
Gluttonfang kept walking.
He hadn't noticed the world blur slightly.
He hadn't noticed that the stars, once a distant presence beyond the upper abyss, had flickered away, replaced by nothing.
He hadn't noticed the subtle tremor in his footing.
Or how each stair looked more like the last.
He hadn't noticed that the Tree's song—once buried behind eons of silence—echoed in his head again.
"The flow of time changes life..."
He mumbled it without thinking, lips dry, eyes half-closed.
"The despair within you, trifles with mine..."
It kept him sane. Maybe.
But sanity was relative in this place.
He didn't notice that the steps never curved, never shifted, never ascended in angle. It was as if he was walking in a straight line, always up, yet never gaining height. But logic had abandoned him long ago.
"The flow of time changes life."
His voice was hoarse. His body, unmoving. Or rather, always moving — one step forward, then the next, then another. The words echoed again.
"The flow of time changes life."
Up the spiral stairs carved from translucent bone and drifting silver fog. For how long had he been walking? A decade? A century? Gluttonfang didn't know anymore. He had stopped trying to count long ago.
"The flow of time changes life."
All twenty of his mouths had spoken it, at least once, some more often than others. One of them had developed a lisp. Another stuttered. One of them — the third mouth on his left shoulder — wept silently each time the line escaped.
His paws never stopped moving. They just kept climbing. The spiraling stairs were endless, rising like the neck of a dead god towards a sky he never reached.
All around him was grey. Not fog — not mist — just… absence. The kind of blankness that eats color and motion. The kind of silence that hisses louder than any scream.
"The flow of time changes life."
His eyes, all eleven of them, stared forward. Unblinking. Unseeing. Seeing only the same repeating steps, the same curve, the same climb.
Then one day — or one breath later, he couldn't tell anymore — he stopped.
Completely.
Just like that.
No fanfare. No thunder. No sudden beam of light from above.
He just paused.
His paw hovered midair, trembling slightly, then lowered. All his eyes blinked — at once.
Nothing had changed.
Everything was still the same.
The stairs curled ahead like they always had. Behind, the same.
The air didn't shift. The grey didn't stir.
Gluttonfang — the beast who devoured beasts, the wolf with many mouths, the terror of the Verdant Wilds — asked a single question, barely louder than a whisper.
"…why?"
Why?
Why had nothing changed?
Why did the flow of time not change life?
He had walked, and walked, and walked — hadn't he?
He had moved forward. Each step was forward. But he remained in the same place.
His steps hadn't mattered.
His struggle hadn't mattered.
The thought crushed him more than any weight he'd borne before. The realization slammed into his gut like the horn of a Charging Warthulk.
Despair took shape in his core.
And it shattered the illusion.
CRACK!
The stairs collapsed beneath him like glass touched by lightning. Shards of spiraling white and echoing despair burst outward and dissolved into nothing.
The infinite stairs, the grey world — gone in a single breath.
He fell.
Tumbled through void and static, mouths screaming nonsense as his thoughts unraveled — until a loud thud jolted his senses.
He landed on the same floating obsidian rock he remembered. The same dark lake below. The same impossible sky above.
The tree with no leaves still sang — though now, faintly.
From the depths of the lake, a ripple formed, then a shape. The abyss opened one tired eye. His voice, raspy and indifferent, drifted up like a stone skipping on oil.
"It took you a day… better than I expected."
"…what?" Gluttonfang blinked, wide-eyed, pacing. "A day?! A single day?! I spent a whole century in that place!"
He didn't even roar — it was too broken for that. It was a howl of disbelief, a cry of betrayal from someone who had truly believed the lie.
The abyss yawned, eyes half-lidded. "Did you…?"
Gluttonfang froze.
His claws clenched. His tail lashed once. He looked down at his body.
There were no new scars. No new weight in his bones. No weathering of his fur. His qi hadn't grown. He hadn't aged.
He was the same.
Exactly the same.
"…h-how?" he choked, every word bitter.
The abyss didn't answer. It just muttered.
"Shush, Wolfy."
"What— What did you just call me?!"
"You've passed the test. Take your rewards and leave." The abyss yawned again, clearly irritated now.
"WHAT? WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY WOLFY? I'M GLUTTONFANG—"
"Shush. Gulufanu. I don't care. Go away. Let me sleep."
"I'M NOT GULUFANU, YOU— Hmph." Gluttonfang snarled, catching himself. His frustration flared, but he wrestled it back down. He straightened, forcing composure. "What test? What rewards? And what the hell is all this?"
The abyss groaned.
"Do I really need to answer allat?"
"Yes. Be—" Gluttonfang began again, but the abyss silenced him with a bored wave.
"Shush. You talking too much, Gloglu. I was going to tell you anyway. Hah… where do I even begin?"
It closed its eyes again, speaking more to itself than to Gluttonfang now.
"This shell world was created by the Great Sealing Turtle, Ayug Ilan. Great Ayug was fond of martial techniques. Loved 'em more than most love their kids. Not that he had any. No kids. No disciples. Didn't trust anyone. Called most folks 'shitty-ass bastards' and moved on. Hah."
The abyss chuckled at its own memory.
"To him, the world was a jar. Sealed. So he wanted to remove the seal. And he did. Went beyond. Broke through. But before that, he left something behind — his legacy. His arts. His inheritance. Thought someone worthy would find it. Hah! No one ever did. Not until now."
Gluttonfang stayed quiet, ears twitching.
"He planted a world. Sparked it. Gave it breath. Made it alive. That spark… was me. Back then, I was nothing. Just a ghost of awareness. A dream of a dream. But over centuries — no, eons — I grew. I watched, I listened, I learned. I became… me. Sentient. Not beast. Not human. Just… being. My form, what you see now, is only shaped by my thoughts. Inspired by others. Visitors. Drifters. Corpses."
The air turned still.
"This world, this shell, is alive. And it's me. I am the test and the tester. The gate and the guardian. Great Ayug gave me that purpose — but I made it my own."
Gluttonfang finally broke his silence. "…And the inheritance?"
"Already in your hands," the abyss muttered, lazy again. "The poem you chanted for decades — that's the martial technique. Not just words, but a mantra. Split each line into a rhyme. Chant it through a mouth — or, if you're fancy, through your head. Rare skill, that one. Harder than it sounds. Then, match it with proper qi flow and body form — boom. Technique."
Gluttonfang's pupils dilated. "Body form…"
"Yeah, yeah." The abyss rolled a wristless arm. "That's the root art. Engraved in all the roots you chewed. You were learning them with your body. Through eating. Hah! Ayug loved that kind of symbolism. And guess what? The specific qi needed for those techniques? Already formed in your dantian. So congrats. You've got all three."
Gluttonfang's twenty mouths gaped in disbelief.
"Now," the abyss grumbled, "eat the rest of the roots before you leave. Outside this world, they'll rot into nothing. Don't waste good stuff."
"…Wait." Gluttonfang narrowed his eyes. "What happens to you?"
The abyss didn't speak for a while. Then…
"This shell world has served its purpose. My purpose. Once you master the inheritance… break the seal. Free me."
"…Is that something Great Ayug wanted?" Gluttonfang asked, suspicious now.
The abyss's eyes opened fully.
"No. I'm not just some puppet. I'm a being, Gluttonfang. Just like you. I want to live. Not sealed in this dream."
A beat of silence. A mutual understanding. Two creatures born of wildness and will, staring at each other.
"…Sigh." Gluttonfang exhaled slowly. "A being to a being. I feel you. If I ever get the power… I'll break the seal."
The abyss almost smiled.
"You're not that bad when it comes to buttering others."
Gluttonfang smirked.
"Then let me ask one last—"
"NOPE. Let me sleep." The abyss cut him off. "Go, Gloglufang. Take your roots. Take your mantra. And shush forever."
And with that, the abyss closed its eyes.
The lake rippled.
The floating world groaned.
The sky twisted — no, folded — and space around Gluttonfang distorted into swirling ripples of colorless light.
Then—
POP.
He vanished.
Thrown from the shell world.
Back to the edge of the obsidian lake, the real lake, in the real world.
Where wind returned.
Where light returned.
Where life — true life — waited.