The air that remained in Zhuihe was not air.
It was after-breath. A world exhaling long after its lungs had turned to dust.
Shen Wuqing sat upon the Blood Throne, yet no crown crowned him. No flag declared dominion. The throne had been made to hold divinity, but it now housed a void. Beneath him, the ground pulsed with a desperate rhythm—like a dying heart mimicking life, too proud to admit it had stopped beating.
The elders, still breathing, gathered in the inner sanctum. They did not kneel out of reverence, nor out of loyalty. They knelt because their spines could no longer carry the weight of remembering what they had done.
"Great One," Elder Jiemu rasped, kneeling so low his forehead touched cracked stone, "we offer you all."
Shen Wuqing did not blink. His eyes were hollow lakes under moonlight—reflecting nothing but the light of things that should not exist.
"Blood," said Jiemu. "You hunger for blood."
A lie.
He did not hunger for blood. He hungered for the erasure of meaning that came after blood—when the warmth left, when names no longer clung to skin, when the world stared at what remained and could not describe it.
Still, they insisted.
"Then take it," another elder offered. "Take the people. Take the weak. Leave the sect intact."
And so, they fed him.
---
From the peaks of the palace, messengers were sent. Bells once used to declare spiritual festivals now tolled for slaughter. Every villager in the valley below was marked. Not chosen—marked.
"Those not of core lineage shall offer themselves," the decree read, written in blood and ash.
Women clutched children. Men packed what little they had. Those too old to move were dragged. There was no rebellion. Only the mechanical shuffling of despair. The people had long been trained to obey, to see sacrifice as noble—even when it reeked of betrayal.
They were brought in processions—rows upon rows, trembling, silent, yet strangely calm. Something in Shen Wuqing's presence silenced them before they spoke. It was not fear.
It was finality.
Like the ending of a sentence too long to endure.
The first were brought before him.
A child of eight. A woman with a swollen belly. A blind man clutching prayer beads.
Shen Wuqing did not rise.
He did not command.
He simply existed.
And existence was enough.
Blood leaked from their pores—not violently, not with pain. It seeped like rain from stone. No screams, no resistance. Their lives were willingly surrendered, not to mercy, but to inevitability.
Elder Jiemu watched from above, eyes glowing with desperate hope.
"If we offer enough… perhaps he'll vanish."
But Shen Wuqing did not vanish.
He became clearer.
As more blood was offered, his form solidified—veins darkening like rivers through marble, limbs no longer shifting between shadow and memory. He became visible. The hunger, now clothed in definition.
The elders mistook this as success.
"The ritual is working!" one whispered.
They did not realize.
It was not a ritual of appeasement.
It was a ritual of invitation.
They were not offering lives to avoid destruction.
They were building a feast for it.
---
Soon, the streets ran red.
Entire blocks of the city were emptied. Mothers sent out their daughters with incense and necklaces of fruit, thinking ritual might protect them. Fathers drank themselves into stupor before dragging themselves to the courtyard.
The Blood Throne pulsed.
Its crimson veins stretched deeper into the earth, awakening things buried beneath: regrets, oaths, bones. Shen Wuqing did not move, but every life offered twisted his silence into gravity.
People began walking toward him on their own.
Drawn by something older than choice.
Drawn by recognition.
He is not a man, they whispered to themselves.
He is not a god.
He is the memory of hunger that lived before we did.
The sect elders began to panic.
"He's not stopping," muttered Jiemu. "Why won't he stop?"
"He was supposed to consume only the weak!"
"He was supposed to be satisfied!"
But hunger, once recognized, cannot be reasoned with. Especially not the kind of hunger that Wuqing carried—hunger that had no object, no goal, only continuation.
He was not an eater of food, nor flesh.
He was the devourer of validity.
And their offerings had only reminded him that such validity could be challenged.
That existence itself had a flavor.
---
One elder, in panic, activated the Heart-Blood Formation.
It was a forbidden array, meant to transmute the collective vitality of thousands into a single, condensed spirit-ward—powerful enough to repel demons.
It required a sacrifice of forty-nine thousand lives.
He activated it anyway.
The earth split open.
Pillars of flesh and blood shot into the sky. Screams merged into a single tone that shook the palace to its bones. Cultivators collapsed as their spirits were extracted through their eyes.
Wuqing remained seated.
Then, he lifted his left hand.
Not high.
Just enough.
The formation unraveled.
The runes twisted into mocking shapes—tongues, worms, teeth. They began to crawl backward along the veins of the formation, returning to their casters. The elder who triggered the spell tried to flee, but the runes entered his mouth.
His body bloated.
His eyes burst.
He screamed, but the sound came out as laughter—not his own, but that of the formation itself.
He fell. Bones first. Then mind.
The formation was never meant to repel Wuqing.
It was meant to remind him how to feed.
---
One woman tried to escape the city with her newborn child.
She ran for hours.
Through ash-choked alleys, over corpses of those too slow, too obedient.
She reached the outer wall.
She looked up.
And saw him.
He was already there.
Not standing.
Not walking.
Just… there.
His gaze never met hers.
But her womb began to bleed.
Not rupture. Not break.
It bled memory—the unborn child's name, its future, its laugh.
All of it fell to the ground as liquid forgetting.
She held her belly and screamed—not because of pain, but because there was nothing left inside to protect.
Shen Wuqing walked past her.
Not in cruelty.
But because he did not see her.
She had already been written out.
---
Back in the sanctum, Elder Jiemu fell to his knees, sobbing into his sleeves.
"We gave you all you asked," he wept. "Why is it not enough?"
A whisper came from behind the throne.
Not from Wuqing.
But from the Blood Throne itself.
A memory… long buried.
"He did not ask," it said.
Jiemu turned.
"No…" he gasped. "No, this can't be…"
The throne was unraveling.
Its roots—drawn from sacrificial altars across generations—had connected directly to Wuqing the moment he sat. Not feeding him, but feeding through him. The throne was not his prison.
It was his vessel.
And the sect had built it with eagerness.
For generations they had bled their people into it, hoping to birth a god of order.
What they created was a god-shaped hole, waiting for the right emptiness to fill it.
Shen Wuqing stood.
Finally.
His feet touched the ground.
The ground screamed.
The elders scattered.
Some fled to vaults filled with sacred relics.
Others drew swords that wept in their scabbards.
A few simply knelt again and began to pray.
Wuqing ignored them.
He walked through walls that became smoke. Through prayers that turned to salt. Through flesh that tried to scream but forgot how.
At the city's center, where the Heartspire stood—a tower containing the names of every sect leader since its founding—Wuqing paused.
He reached into the stone.
Pulled out one name.
His own.
Not carved.
Not written.
But scratched in desperation, long ago.
He held it.
Let it bleed.
And then ate it.
Not the stone.
Not the name.
The recognition.
The remembrance.
And in that moment, all who had ever uttered his name felt something slip from their tongues.
Something they could no longer recall.
He walked again.
And the sect, fed fat on its own blood, collapsed behind him.
Still whispering.
Still begging.
Still burning incense to a god it had never truly seen.
Shen Wuqing did not turn back.
He did not look at what remained.
Because he knew:
They had fed him.
But what he devoured…
…was what they once called themselves.