The walls screamed.
Not with sound. Not with the kindness of voice or the sharpness of memory, but with something older—flesh that remembered being human. And beneath the hymn of pulsing crimson and twitching bone, Shen Wuqing walked barefoot. The blood did not stain him. It parted, reverent.
The temple was no longer sacred. It was a mouth, and it had learned to sing.
He stood in its throat.
There was no light. Only marrow. Only the shifting of skinless faces embedded into the architecture, whispering fragments of doctrine in a thousand contradictory tongues.
They spoke of mercy. Of forgiveness. Of repentance.
He fed on every word like they were entrails.
A girl knelt at the altar. No more than twelve. Her stomach carved open in ritual, yet her eyes still glistened with the dazed shimmer of pre-death. She looked up at him, lips trembling. No voice came. Only breath.
The priests around her had already been silenced.
Not by death.
But by him.
He had pulled their tongues out last, after their hearts stopped screaming.
You seek salvation, they had whispered before.
Now, their mouths were pits.
Shen Wuqing looked at the child. Then the altar. Then the choir behind her—fleshless, genderless, eyes gouged, but still singing.
Their voices were not made of sound.
They were made of guilt.
"Spare her," one face whispered from the pillar.
"She is not yet devoured," another moaned from the floor tiles.
"She believes," croaked the mouth inside a broken gong.
Shen Wuqing stepped closer. His robes trailed behind him like a shadow bleeding backward in time.
He knelt before the girl—not out of reverence, but curiosity.
She tried to speak.
He pressed a finger to her open abdomen. The warmth there was dying, flickering like a prayer too soft to reach any heaven.
"You pray to gods who turn you into offerings."
His voice was dry. Not cruel. Just done.
"I am not a god," he continued. "But I eat what they leave behind."
She reached up—tiny hand, broken wrist, trembling fingers.
He did not move.
Not because he was merciful.
But because there was no part of him left to react.
He let her touch his chest.
"You're… warm," she mouthed.
Shen Wuqing closed her eyes for her.
Then devoured her soul.
There was no flash. No scream. Her body remained. Still knelt. Still hopeful.
But the thing that made her her was gone—folded into the cold chambers behind his eyes, where everything he consumed went to forget itself.
The choir faltered.
One of them let out a note that cracked.
Wuqing turned his gaze on them.
"No more songs," he said.
He raised his hand.
The walls trembled.
And one by one, the choir collapsed—not from force, but from their own mercy, crumbling under the realization that nothing they ever believed in could save them.
Their voices shattered like porcelain.
The temple fell silent.
For a moment, Wuqing stood in it. Listening. Not to the quiet. But to the absence of begging.
He liked it better.
Above, a bell rang. Distant. Hollow.
Another sect.
Another army.
They had come with banners made of skin, with sutras carved into living monks, each warrior a sermon, each formation a ritual.
He stepped out of the temple.
The sky was bleeding.
Clouds like torn parchment floated over a field of corpses that had not yet died.
He walked between them.
The soldiers saw him.
They charged.
He did not raise a hand.
The ground did.
It opened like a mouth, teeth of old bones, tongues of rotted roots, and swallowed the front lines whole.
The second wave hesitated.
Wuqing looked at their leader—an elder wrapped in crimson chains, chanting with eyes shut, fingers blistered from casting seals over and over.
"You are not supposed to exist," the elder screamed, "You are a paradox."
"I am what comes after prayers stop working," Wuqing answered.
The elder unleashed a technique.
Ten thousand lotus petals of light, each one carrying a vow of protection, a scream of hope, a promise to the heavens.
Wuqing opened his mouth.
And devoured the light.
Not with cultivation.
Not with hunger.
But with refusal.
Refusal to be defined.
Refusal to be saved.
The petals turned gray. Then ash. Then nothing.
The elder began chanting faster.
Wuqing appeared before him—not teleported, not moved. Simply there, like an answer that had always been waiting in the silence between questions.
He whispered something.
The elder's ears bled.
He whispered again.
The elder's memories bled.
The third time—
The elder forgot his own name.
And in that void, Wuqing reached into the space between the man's ribs and pulled out his last prayer.
It writhed in his hand like a worm.
Wuqing looked at it.
Then crushed it.
Behind him, the soldiers fell to their knees—not in surrender, but despair.
One of them—a woman with only one arm, eyes torn out by self-sacrifice—crawled forward.
"Kill us," she begged. "Please. End us."
Wuqing knelt.
She reached up, shaking.
"Why do you still fight?" he asked.
"We don't," she sobbed. "We just... hoped."
He looked into the empty sockets of her eyes.
"There is no mercy here," he said softly. "Only the echo of what you thought it meant."
She nodded. Smiled.
He let her live.
Not out of compassion.
But because her hope had already died.
He continued forward.
The battlefield folded behind him—not in flame, not in ruin, but in silence.
Like a page torn from a book that no longer wanted to remember its story.
At the mountain's foot, the last sect awaited.
Seven elders in golden robes. Each one a path. A principle. A virtue.
They raised their weapons.
He raised his eyes.
"We judged you in absence," they declared in unison. "Now we shall judge you in presence."
He nodded.
"Then see me clearly."
And for a moment, he let them see.
Not his form.
Not his power.
But the thing underneath.
The thing that kept devouring.
The thing that remembered every betrayal, every lie sung as doctrine, every child offered in divine trade.
They saw it.
And one by one, the elders tore out their own eyes.
Not from fear.
But from shame.
Wuqing did not kill them.
He walked past.
And as he did, their golden robes faded into dust.
At the peak of the mountain, the last shrine stood.
It had no walls.
Only a mirror.
It did not reflect him.
But something older.
A boy, once. Kneeling. Alone. Forgotten. Waiting for someone to call his name.
Wuqing walked to it.
The boy inside the mirror looked up.
And smiled.
You've eaten so much, the boy said without sound. But you never ate your own heart.
Wuqing reached forward.
Touched the glass.
And cracked it.
The boy inside shattered.
And with him, the last remnant of what mercy had once meant.
The temple behind him collapsed.
The skies above him screamed.
But Shen Wuqing did not look back.
He walked down the mountain.
And the earth followed.