The alarm continued to shriek incessantly, its sound crossing the boundary of a message to become a form of auditory torture. Piercing and persistent, it was like a drill boring deep into the eardrums, inciting the hidden madness within the veins of everyone living in this training camp.
Tian Cang stood silently in the room recently stained by the blood of six corpses. He listened to the chaos exploding outside, separating each layer of sound like a craftsman untangling matted threads.
In the fragments of his past life's memories, Blood Flame purges always occurred in silence—cold and decisive like a backstab. But this time, it was intentionally loud. It was as if someone wanted to stir this entire stagnant swamp just to see what kind of monster would rise to the surface.
He pushed the door open and stepped into the corridor. The metallic scent of fresh blood hit his nostrils, thick and nauseating.
The clash of metal, the screams, and the sound of tearing flesh echoed through the narrow space. Tian Cang pressed himself into the shadows, watching the scene before him. Trainees who had shared a table just yesterday were now slaughtering each other in a frenzy. Their attacks coordinated mechanically, with a chilling precision, as if an invisible thread were pulling the strings of these flesh puppets.
Mind control? Or mana suppression?
He had no time to find the answer.
A chill ran down his spine—the survival instinct of one who had once reached the Blood Firmament warned him of danger from behind. Tian Cang turned his head.
At the far end of the long corridor, a massive figure blocked the way.
This man was entirely different from the elegant swordsman earlier. If the swordsman was a razor-sharp wind, the man before him was a colossal boulder bringing suffocating pressure. Standing over two meters tall, his muscles rippled like the twisted roots of ancient trees, and in his hands, he brandished a thick, double-edged battle axe. The blade wasn't overly sharp, but its weight and size were enough to render any armor meaningless.
"You..." the brute spoke, his voice deep and guttural like rolling thunder in a cave. "They said I have to kill you first."
He slammed his foot onto the floor.
BOOM!
The wooden floorboards shattered under the terrifying weight. He lunged with a speed that completely contradicted his massive frame, the axe tearing through the air as it descended. Tian Cang slipped to the side by a hair's breadth.
CRASH!!!
The impact pulverized the floor into tens of thousands of splinters, wood flying out like small shrapnel embedding into the walls. Tian Cang felt the pressure of the strike through the compressed air, enough for him to understand that taking a direct hit from that axe would be the final chapter for this body.
Pure strength. A style of combat so simple it was perfect.
He intended to close the distance, but the brute swung the axe in a wide horizontal sweep, occupying the entire width of the corridor. Tian Cang retreated, but his Mortal Firmament body reacted half a beat slower than his consciousness.
SHLIK!
The axe blade grazed his chest, tearing through his clothes and leaving a long gash on his flesh. Blood immediately soaked his shirt.
He recalculated. Dodging in this narrow space was not a path to survival; it was merely a slower way to die. Tian Cang changed his tactics, lunging directly at the giant.
The brute laughed—a savage laugh filled with genuine excitement. "That's it! Come here!"
The axe came down again. Tian Cang stepped off at a miniscule angle, letting the blade graze his shoulder. Blood sprayed, but he had entered the opponent's dead zone—the range where the long axe became a cumbersome, useless tool. He delivered a punch concentrated with all his weight into the giant's abdomen.
THUD!
The man retreated half a step, his expression flickering, but his legs remained as steady as stone pillars. This man's body was as hard as cast iron. He snarled, releasing one hand from the axe handle and clamping it around Tian Cang's throat like he was catching a chicken.
"Die, you piece of trash!"
His throat was constricted. Air was sucked out of his lungs. His vision began to blur, closing in from the edges like a lens shutting down.
In that moment hovering near death, Tian Cang's heart suddenly gave a deafening throb.
The red fissure beneath the skin of his arm glowed with an eerie, dark-crimson hue.
The System remained silent. The primal instinct of the Blood Firmament surged earlier than expected—earlier than any timeline he had ever imagined. Tian Cang dug his fingers directly into the arm choking him.
The giant's blood suddenly flowed backward into Tian Cang's body through his fingertips.
[Skill: Blood Devour — Deviation]
This was a direct annexation, entirely different from the gentle absorption he had performed before. The axe-wielder's muscles began to convulse violently; his healthy skin turned grey in seconds as his lifeblood was unnaturally drained, like water being sucked back through a pipe.
"What... what is this?!" the giant roared in horror, but his strength was deserting him faster than his breath.
Tian Cang gritted his teeth. His eyes were dyed entirely in the glowing red of a demon; his body radiated heat like forged iron.
"Give me everything!"
Power flooded in like a searing deluge, burning through his veins. He felt his body expanding, becoming insanely strong yet simultaneously fragile in the way borrowed power always carries its own debt.
He spun, snapping the arm choking him like a dry twig.
CRACK!!!
The battle axe hit the floor with a resounding clang. Tian Cang unleashed a brutal punch straight into the opponent's throat. The giant collapsed, his eyes wide with the bewilderment of one who never understood why he lost. His breath hitched, his massive frame shuddered once, then lay still.
Tian Cang slumped down, panting.
He looked at his hands. The enemy's blood was still there, but it was turning dark black and soaking back into his skin like parched earth absorbing water. The red fissure on his arm had expanded further, crawling up to his shoulder like demonic roots painting their own path.
Evolution was happening too fast. This never happened in the old timeline.
A chill washed over him—a chill that didn't come from wounds or exhaustion, but from the realization that his body was becoming something beyond his own control.
Tian Cang slowly lifted his head toward the corridor ceiling.
There, hidden within the shadows, a complex geometric magic circle was spinning silently. It was so faint that without the senses of someone who had fought on the brink of death many times, he would have missed it as easily as dust on the ceiling.
A cold, mechanical, soulless voice rang down from the magic circle:
"Confirmed."
Tian Cang froze, his pupils contracting.
"Subject No. 17-46. Displaying Tier 1 Blood Firmament deviation exceeding permitted levels."
The magic circle suddenly turned a brilliant red.
"Verdict: High research value subject. Priority: Recovery. Authorization: Level 3 force permitted."
Footsteps rang out again from both ends of the corridor.
This time, it was different. Rhythmic footsteps, the powerful clanking of metal—the distance between each step was so terrifyingly identical it was like clocks being wound at the same time. These were people moving in formation, trained to surround and recover, and they were narrowing the gap from both sides.
Tian Cang stood straight, wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth.
His gaze swept the corridor, calculating exits, wall angles, distances, and the order in which they would appear. He calculated with the coldness of a man who had done this in a hundred different scenarios in his past life.
This was a hunt. The magic circle on the ceiling was the hunter's eye. The frenzied trainees were there to flush out the prey. The soldiers at dawn were there to mark him. The axe-wielding giant was there to force the prey to use its true power.
And he had followed their script perfectly.
He clenched his fists, feeling the deviating power coursing through his flesh—a borrowed strength that would recede in a few dozen breaths, leaving his body emptier than before.
It turned out that from the moment he opened his eyes in that wooden room, he was already the prey.
Tian Cang's shadow stretched long across the blood-soaked corridor under the flickering light of the magic circle above. He looked toward the closer end of the hallway, where the first silhouette of the recovery team was about to round the corner.
The game had changed.
But the ones who set the rules still didn't know that their prey was once the very thing that forced the Holy Kingdom of Lumina to send an executioner to wipe out the source.