Before blood, there was hunger.
Before hunger, there was shame.
Shen Wuqing did not awaken with a roar, nor rise like a hero drawn by destiny. He did not burst into existence bearing sword and mandate. He crawled—through bile, rot, and the sounds of things dying quietly.
In the fourth step of the Devourer's Path, the past did not return as memory.
It returned as stench.
---
The world around him darkened—not into shadow, but into texture. Dust and ash peeled away from reality, revealing a layer beneath it: not illusion, not realm-travel, but recollection given form.
He stood upon that which he had once tried to forget.
A frozen dusk.
Fields of cracked bone under a sky that had never known warmth.
And at the center of it—a child, no older than eight, naked from the waist down, crouched beneath a withered tree. His limbs were thin, bruised blue by cold. His mouth was red, not from paint or food, but from chewing something too rough for human teeth.
A dead rabbit.
Half-rotted. Still warm with maggots. Its eyes gone, its throat torn open, but its heart untouched.
Shen Wuqing, as he was now, watched silently.
The child Shen Wuqing tore the rabbit open.
Bit into its belly.
Gagged.
Choked.
Vomited bile that splattered across the snow.
He tried again.
His hands trembled so violently he couldn't hold the corpse steady. His fingernails had begun to come loose. His jaw ached from clenching against hunger. His stomach growled like a chained dog gnawing its own spine.
But he ate.
Not out of instinct.
Not even out of desperation.
He ate because nothing else had ever accepted him.
Not the sect.
Not the elders.
Not the sky.
Not the names whispered into his cradle.
But this—this festering, half-dead thing—did not resist.
It yielded.
And for a child left to die among discarded scrolls and broken swords, that was enough.
---
The present Wuqing knelt beside the memory.
He did not flinch.
He watched himself rip into the rabbit's liver, spit it out, try again. He watched tears stream down the boy's face—not from pain, but from disgust. A disgust so visceral it twisted his ribs inward.
He had wanted to die.
He had wanted to starve.
But hunger had refused to allow it.
And in doing so, had rewritten him.
Every chew, every gulp, every retch was a verse in a scripture that no deity had blessed.
The Devourer's Path did not begin with strength.
It began with rejection.
Of morality.
Of decorum.
Of comfort.
Even of the self.
---
A voice broke the stillness.
Not from outside.
Not from spirit.
But from the tree itself.
You did not choose to live, it said.
You were refused the right to die.
Wuqing turned his gaze upward.
The tree's bark peeled, revealing mouths. Dozens. Hundreds. All shaped like the mouths of those he had consumed—elders, spirits, children. Each one mouthing a single word:
"Enough."
But he did not answer.
Because even now, he knew—
It had never been enough.
---
The scene shifted.
The child Wuqing stood, hands bloodied, face smeared.
He stared at the rabbit's hollow carcass.
Then turned.
He saw a puddle.
His reflection.
He whispered something.
Something the present Wuqing had long since buried.
But here, in this moment of unveiling, the words returned like wounds tearing themselves back open.
"If I am to become something… let it be the end of need."
That was his first vow.
Not to conquer.
Not to cultivate.
But to unbecome hunger by devouring it.
And the world had heard.
Had trembled.
Had sent him gods and monsters, sects and saints, love and betrayal.
And all of them had bled into that single, quiet desire.
---
The rabbit's corpse cracked.
Not from decay.
But from recognition.
Its bones twisted, sprouting legs. Its fur reversed its rot, becoming ghost-white. The maggots fell away and melted into symbols. It stood, undead yet living, and stared at Wuqing with eyes now filled with… pity.
"You were not supposed to survive," it said.
Wuqing's voice was low, almost gentle.
"I wasn't given the option."
The rabbit-ling creature lunged, not to kill, but to drag him back—into the shame, the revulsion, the sickness that had once made him gag in his sleep.
He did not resist.
He devoured it.
Not physically.
But existentially.
He consumed the memory of disgust.
And in doing so, redefined it.
Disgust was not weakness.
It was hunger's first language.
---
When the vision ended, Wuqing stood in the ashes of Zhuihe.
But something had shifted.
His spine arched more deeply.
His skin bore thin black veins—markings that pulsed with rhythms not tied to heartbeat or breath, but to acceptance.
The fourth step of the Devourer's Path had not granted him power.
It had granted him reconciliation.
The part of him that once vomited.
The part of him that once wept.
The part of him that prayed for sleep so he could die without guilt—
All of it was now fed.
Not full.
But acknowledged.
The hunger no longer denied its origin.
It honored it.
---
Above him, clouds gathered—not with thunder, but with remembrance.
The world was watching.
But not as judge.
Not even as witness.
The world was learning.
It had tried to cast him out.
Tried to silence him.
Tried to buy his absence with offerings.
But now it knew—
He was not a storm.
He was weather.
And weather does not end.
It only changes the shape of what survives it.
---
At the edge of the city, a small shrine crumbled.
It had once been dedicated to a minor god of hearth and seed. Children had placed rice there, mothers had lit oil lamps, asking for safe harvests.
Now, Wuqing passed it.
He did not destroy it.
He placed the rabbit's memory upon its altar.
Not as mercy.
Not as atonement.
But as a marker.
Of where the fourth step began.
And where it would never end.
Because hunger that accepts itself is no longer a curse.
It is a doctrine.
And Shen Wuqing, silent, expressionless, swallowed the last taste of disgust—
And smiled.