Death was not silence; it was a pungent, metallic taste tearing through my throat.
As the finest manuscript editor in the literary world, I spent my years straightening the crooked narratives of others, transforming the drafts of amateurs into masterpieces. But in our world, "success" is an unforgivable crime—and yes, it is a crime. My colleague, the one I mistook for a friend, the person I taught how to hold a pen and how to edit just to make him successful, was the one who laced my coffee with arsenic. I saw the look of pure malice in his eyes as I suffocated; it was a look that said: "Your death is the only way for me to step out of your shadow."
As my consciousness faded, the last words I ever edited were etched into my mind. They were from a draft of a cliché dark fantasy novel titled The Fall of Light.
Then... the thread snapped.
I didn't wake up in Heaven, nor in the Hell we know. I woke up in a "storage unit."
There was no air, only a cold, viscous fluid filling my tiny lungs. My eyes were open amidst a pitch-black darkness, but I began to feel the vibrations. I felt narrow walls pressing in on me—not the walls of a warm womb, but walls that were cold, hard, and rigid.
CRACK!
Suddenly, the "vessel" I was in split open. I fell violently onto a stone floor slick with blood and filth. I tried to scream, but I couldn't utter a sound; my lungs expelled black fluid instead of air. I looked around, and my very soul shuddered at a sight no human eye should have to endure.
I wasn't in an operating room. I was in a vast basement that resembled a "slaughterhouse." Along the walls, dozens of female corpses hung from iron chains, their bellies sliced open and repaired with thick, coarse stitching. These women weren't mothers; they were "vessels." Dead husks enchanted to become "industrial incubators" for the manufacture of a slave army.
Beside me, dozens of infants crawled through crimson pools, their bodies pale as plaster, their eyes void of any soul.
"Batch No. 666 is ready," came a voice from behind a black hood, a voice dripping with cold indifference.
A man with distorted features walked among us, kicking a child here, picking another up by the foot there. "This one is weak... feed him to the dogs. This one is deformed... feed him as well."
The man stopped at me. He looked into my eyes and said, "This one... this one absorbed the death energy from the incubator well. Put him in the front ranks."
In that moment, my mind screamed with realization.
This scene... the "Dead Incubators," "Batch 666"... Why do these words sound so familiar?
I was inside the last novel I had edited! And in that novel, these children aren't human; they are created through a filthy magical process to be mere "cannon fodder." They are placed in the front lines to be slaughtered by the Hero, solely to drain the Hero's mana slightly.
I am no one's son. I am a "product" in a death factory.
Envy killed me in my world, and here, I was born to be a trivial sacrifice in someone else's story.
I looked at my tiny hands, stained with the blood of the woman I never knew, and felt a malice that transcended human limits.
Terror gripped me, and I began to tremble, forcing myself to regain my composure so as not to draw any more attention.
Take him to the East Room, the wing reserved for the Black Pawns," the massive man commanded, then tossed me to another guard waiting behind him.
The guard carried me by my feet, my head dangling downward, and began walking through long, dark corridors where the walls seemed to whisper with the voices of the tormented. I could see the corpses of children who had failed to "survive birth" being thrown into a deep pit from which blue flames flickered.
We entered a vast room, cold as a tomb, where dozens of infants were spread across stone tables. The air here reeked of ancient death. The guard slammed me roughly onto one of the tables, then branded my shoulder with a glowing red iron bearing the mark: (666-01).
The pain was unbearable, yet my scream remained trapped in my throat. I stared up at the dark ceiling, feeling a cold malice boiling in my tiny veins. In my previous world, I was killed by betrayal; here, I was born from a corpse to be nothing more than fuel for someone else's fire.
The massive iron door groaned shut behind the guards—a sound like the wailing of tortured souls—leaving us in the gloom of the East Room. There was no light except for the glow of the brands seared into our shoulders, which pulsed with a faint purple hue, like a parasite draining whatever remained of our lives.
I looked down the long row of my "brothers"; dozens of infants sprawled across cold stone tables. Some had already drawn their final breath; others stared into the void with glassy, dead eyes.
In that moment, every trace of the literary editor I once was vanished. Fear evaporated, replaced by an icy coldness that rivaled the chill of this basement. I recalled the final sentence I had read in that cursed novel: "And Batch 666 was but black dust beneath the feet of the Light."
I felt something strange stirring deep within my chest... a dark, viscous, and poisonous energy began to seep from the "brand" and flow through my veins. My body did not reject it; instead, it swallowed the energy hungrily, as if I had been born to be a sinkhole for this darkness.
I lifted my small, trembling hand before my eyes in the dark. It wasn't shaking from terror, but moving with a predatory instinct I had never known before.
"An extra death?" I smiled inwardly—a smile that would have made the guards shudder had they seen it.
If this world has made me a "Son of Darkness" just to die for the glory of your Hero... then I will learn how to feast upon this darkness until I am gorged, and I will turn my promised death into a banquet that devours you all.
I closed my eyes, and for the first time since being born from that corpse, I felt a sense of ease. I no longer heard the crying of the infants around me; instead, I began to hear the pulse of this cursed place... and that pulse told me I was not the only pawn planning a rebellion....
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Hello friends, I'm a new writer and I hope you'll support me. This is my second novel, I hope you like it.
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