In the deepest basin of the Bloodchant Plains, where even sunlight refused to spill, there existed a pit that had not been named, only mourned.
The cultivators of the Vermillion Dagger Sect called it Mother's Scar—a sinkhole that screamed in the language of infants and bled pale light with every moonrise. They thought it sacred. They thought it divine. But Shen Wuqing, standing at the edge with robes soaked in arterial silence, felt only hunger vibrating in his marrow.
The earth below trembled as if something immense stirred, something not meant to breathe. The light was not light—it was memory regurgitated from the womb of a dying reality. Every beam carried the weight of screaming mothers and forgotten children. And as Wuqing stepped forward, the sound did not greet him—it wept into him.
This was not a battlefield. This was not a tomb.
This was a womb.
And he had come to devour its child.
The descent was not steep, but the air grew colder with every step. The soil beneath his feet was flesh-like, warm and veined with twitching crimson threads. He felt no fear. He had drowned it in the blood of cities. He had carved silence into sects that once howled his name in hatred. He had turned divinity into digestion.
Now he walked into a place where the Dao itself whimpered.
A malformed cry echoed up the tunnel. Not the cry of a baby—but something trying to mimic one. As if the pit were giving birth to concepts malformed by absence, ideas too shattered to be spoken aloud.
He passed murals on the walls—etched not with ink or chisel, but with fingernails. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Carvings made by hands that had no names and no bones, forming symbols that twisted in place, never staying still, never staying real.
Shen Wuqing did not blink.
He stepped deeper.
Deeper still.
Until he arrived in the chamber of womblight.
The walls pulsed with bioluminescent blood. In the center, tethered by golden umbilical chains to the ceiling of nothing, floated the being.
It had no skin.
Its mouth was wide, lips torn open and still growing. Its eyes were clusters of mouths, blinking in rhythms too complex to count. Its body was half-human, half-sectarian monument—its spine lined with prayer flags, its chest opened like a cradle to reveal beating hearts that belonged to none of its own lineage.
A Fetus of Dao. Still forming. Still screaming. A child born not of love, not of lust, but of collective worship and war.
It saw Wuqing, and it began to beg.
Not in words.
But in offerings.
From its mouth, it exhaled visions—promises of realms unburnt, faces never killed, lovers untainted by time or betrayal. It showed Wuqing a mirror of the self he could've been, wrapped in robes of gold, teaching disciples who loved him. A life he might have had if the world were less cruel.
Wuqing watched in silence.
Then he spoke.
"You imitate light, but you were born from screams."
The fetus shuddered. Light bled faster.
He walked forward, step by step, and the golden umbilical cords began to writhe, not to fight, but to embrace. They recognized him.
He was not a devourer.
He was the return.
The womb had waited for him—not to destroy the child, but to replace it.
But Wuqing had no intention of being born again.
He had already died once.
He raised his hand, and from his fingertips spilled not Qi, not blade-light, but absence. A void that cracked the walls of the chamber and turned the fetal light into gray ash. The prayers folded inward, the blood curdled into salt, and the fetal being screamed with all the voices of the mothers who had once begged the heavens for salvation.
He stepped into the cradle.
Placed a hand on the fetus' chest.
And devoured its heartbeat.
Not just the organ. Not just the rhythm.
But the concept of future that beat inside its chest.
With one pull, Shen Wuqing took the unborn timeline into himself. All the faith that had been poured into this creature by the Vermillion Dagger Sect for seven generations—their dreams of ascension, of divine rebirth—collapsed into a single breath.
Which he inhaled.
And silence returned.
The womb collapsed inward, like a mouth closing over its own tongue.
The umbilical gold writhed one last time and turned black.
When Wuqing stepped out of the pit, hours later, there was no light behind him. Only the scent of wombmilk curdling in the dirt.
The Vermillion Dagger Sect stood in ranks before him. Hundreds. They had waited for their Child of Rebirth to rise. Instead, they saw a figure in black, eyes deeper than tombs, mouth bleeding with pale light.
One elder stepped forward, voice trembling.
"Where is our divine—"
Wuqing raised a single finger.
And the elder forgot why he spoke.
The Sect Master screamed an incantation and cast a divine barrier shaped like a thousand screaming infants, formed from golden Qi and regret.
Wuqing blinked.
The technique unformed itself, turning the infants into dust midair.
They didn't explode.
They didn't vanish.
They regretted their existence and simply stopped continuing.
He walked.
They attacked.
They burned him with sacred light, sliced at him with soulsteel, called down the wrath of a hundred ancestors from painted scrolls—but he kept walking.
And with each step, another name vanished.
Not just the person. Their name.
He did not kill them.
He unremembered them.
He arrived at the heart of their Sect—a crimson statue shaped like a mother holding a faceless child. A monument built on sacrifice, fed by the blood of pregnant women for seventy-seven years.
He touched the statue.
And it wept.
Real tears.
From stone.
Not out of mercy.
But because even divinity now feared him.
He opened his mouth. He did not speak. He simply breathed.
The air turned sterile. The land turned pale. Every fertile woman in the city miscarried that moment—wombs turning to shriveled silence. Every child under the age of three cried once and then never again. Their tears turned white.
The Vermillion Dagger Sect became a name spoken only in recoils.
He left the city behind without turning back.
And behind him, the world did not burn.
It simply stopped wanting to exist.
Not out of hatred.
But because he had been born from what was never meant to live.
And now he carried that silence in every breath, every step, every devouring moment.
No heaven wept for what he destroyed.
Because even heaven knew—
—he had only begun to feed.