The light of dawn never returned after the fall of the eighth sun.
The sky was a permanent bruise — dim, bleeding faint shades of red and gray. Winds howled through the canyons, carrying the stench of ash and death.
Aaryan awoke amidst ruins. His body ached, his mouth dry, his stomach twisting in hunger. The ground around him was cracked, scorched, and littered with bones half-buried in soot.
The silence was unbearable.
He sat there for hours, staring at the nothingness. The corpses he had left behind days ago were gone — devoured by beasts, time, or the world itself.
Only one thing remained within him — the Sha essence, pulsing like a second heart.
It was faint but alive, whispering to him like a shadow breathing beneath his skin.
> "Devour… or die…"
The words weren't his own, yet they echoed through his mind.
Aaryan pressed a trembling hand to his chest.
Each heartbeat felt like it was dragging him closer to oblivion. His strength had been gone for days — food, water, warmth, all stripped away.
He stumbled through the desolate landscape until he found movement — a dying beast.
Its fur was gray, matted with blood, and its eyes glowed faintly blue. It was gasping, its ribs visible, caught in a hunter's trap that no longer had an owner.
For a long while, Aaryan simply stared at it.
> "You're like me," he murmured. "Starving… forgotten… dying."
The beast growled weakly, a sound halfway between defiance and fear.
And that was when Aaryan understood the whisper in his chest. The Sha essence didn't just feed on light or spirit — it could consume life.
He knelt beside the creature, his shadow stretching over it.
Instinct guided him.
He placed his hand upon its head, and the air trembled.
The beast convulsed once, twice… then went still. Its faint blue glow streamed into his palm like smoke.
Cold. Heavy. Addictive.
He inhaled sharply as the Sha essence within him stirred — not with fire, but with hunger. For the first time since the eighth sun fell, his body felt alive again.
> "So this is it," he whispered. "The law of the fallen world — to eat, or be eaten."
---
He continued walking.
Hours turned to days, and hunger returned. The Sha essence dulled it, but never silenced it.
On the third day, he found a survivor.
A man — older, ragged, clutching a broken spear. His eyes darted around like a frightened animal's. When he saw Aaryan, he froze.
> "You—stay back! I have nothing! Nothing left!"
Aaryan's expression was calm. "Then you're already dead."
The man trembled. "We can help each other! I know where there's food—"
> "I don't need food."
Something inside Aaryan shifted — not rage, not hatred, only clarity.
> "Do you know what the world has become?" Aaryan's voice was soft, almost kind. "The strong devour the weak. The light has fallen. And I…" — his eyes turned black as Sha energy rippled from his palm — "…I am very hungry."
The man turned to run, but the shadow reached faster. His scream echoed across the dead plain, fading into the wind like a prayer swallowed by night.
When silence returned, Aaryan stood alone again — stronger, colder, and utterly calm.
> "He was right," Aaryan muttered to himself. "There's nothing left."
He looked at his hand. It trembled faintly — not from guilt, but from realization.
> "Mercy," he said softly, "is just another word for weakness."
---
That night, he sat atop a ruined altar — one of many relics from a forgotten temple. Moonlight, or what remained of it, glimmered faintly across his face.
He could feel the Sha essence coiling through his veins, whispering secrets in the voice of the abyss.
"Devour to live. Devour to grow. Devour to rule."
He closed his eyes and listened. It wasn't madness. It was truth.
For the first time in his life, truth made sense.
> "The world calls it evil," he whispered, "but the world itself is built on devouring."
A flicker of darkness gathered around his fingertips. He shaped it — rough, unstable, yet alive. His first technique was born.
Devouring Sha Art – First Form: Soul Thread.
A technique to draw the essence of others and weave it into his own life force. Crude, incomplete, but his.
He smiled faintly.
Once, he had been a boy dreaming of becoming a cultivator. Now, he was a monster crafting his own path from the remains of gods.
---
"If the heavens abandon me," he said to the night, "then I will abandon the heavens."
The darkness seemed to respond, pulsing with quiet approval.
Aaryan stood and looked out over the wasteland — a world where beasts ruled, the strong enslaved the weak, and light was only a memory.
He wasn't afraid anymore.
He understood the rule of this new world.
> "To live," he whispered, "one must learn to take."
He turned his back to the broken altar, his shadow stretching far across the ash. The whisper of the Sha pulsed once more — a heartbeat echoing the will of the dark.
---
Next Chapter: Chapter 4 – The Weight of Hunger
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