Fan Yue sat on bare ground, his back against the cold rock. Dried blood covered his body in a thick crust, like a second skin. It pulled at his muscles, cracking with every movement.
Time flowed on — but the days here carried no weight. They stretched like a single endless moment suspended between one breath and the next.
Every time sleep finally caught him, scenes would flare before his eyes. Home. His mother's voice. His little sister's laughter. Training with his father and Teacher Shu. The Academy. His friends' faces. Laughter. The life he was supposed to be living.
But in the place where he should have been, she always appeared.
The Heavenly Crow.
She stood among them, laughed with them, and someone spoke his name — but looked at her. The same Battle Soul. The same abilities. The same bloodline.
And in everything, she was better.
Better with a sword. Better with power. Better at studying. Better with people.
"...Damn..." he hissed through clenched teeth.
The rage came without warning. Fan Yue snapped to his feet and drove his fist into the rock.
BOOM. The dull sound rolled across the vast, empty expanse.
The rock cracked — not symbolically, not in his imagination, but actually. A piece of it broke away, raising a huge cloud of dust.
He went still and looked slowly at his hand.
His bones weren't broken. The skin was only torn. The muscles beneath it twitched with a strength he hadn't been aware of.
He didn't know when it had happened. He didn't know where this strength had come from — whether from this place, or the constant fighting, or the meat and blood he had eaten and drunk, or the hatred that refused to let his body die.
He had no answer.
Fan Yue clenched his teeth so hard the taste of blood spread through his mouth.
"I'll go back. I'll go back no matter what... and I'll kill that thing."
He gripped the bone sword tightly and went out to hunt.
Time flowed again.
Day followed day.
Fan Yue sat in the cave, barely moving. His face had gone deathly pale, as though the blood had left it for good. His body remained red — not from life, but from his own blood and that of others. His hair was matted.
Only his eyes — once clear and bright — were constantly wet. Beneath them lay deep, painful shadows.
He was silent for a long time.
Then his lips moved.
Fan Yue covered his face with his palms.
The tears came suddenly, soundlessly. They ran down his cheeks, dripped onto the stone, mixing with dirt and dried blood. His shoulders began to shake. His breathing broke apart, became ragged and uncontrolled.
"A-a-a-ah!" It tore out of him.
The cry was not angry. It was broken.
Fan Yue collapsed to the ground and curled in on himself like a child shielding itself from a world that had proven too cruel.
"Why?! Why?! Why?!" he screamed until his voice gave out.
His heart was gripped as though by iron clamps. Every moment of the Heavenly Crow's life cut through his consciousness like a knife.
At first he tried not to sleep. But sleep always won. And he began to dread closing his eyes.
His cries filled the cave, rolled across the rocky mountains, but the world remained deaf. Bitterness flooded his mind.
He cried for a long time.
Long enough for the pain to go numb.
Long enough for the tears to run out.
When his eyes went dry, blood began seeping from the corners. Thin trails, burning and hot.
"I..." came hoarsely from his throat. His voice was cracked. "I can't even get out of here..."
He clenched his teeth.
I can't be with them. And even if I go back — who will I go back as?
His fingers dug into the earth, breaking his nails.
How do I get my strength back? How do I reclaim my fate? How do I prove... that I am me?
Memories flashed in fragments like heated needles driving straight into his heart. Each time they grew dimmer, until they turned grey and burned away.
I feel like I'm losing myself...
He was afraid to close his eyes.
Afraid to see his family's happiness.
Afraid to find himself again in a world where there was no place left for him.
He didn't know how much time had passed when he finally rose.
His figure resembled a walking corpse — slow, vacant gaze, locked body. On his way, he was attacked by bipedal black dogs and dark skeletons.
He didn't speed up.
He didn't think.
One step.
One swing.
They died.
He didn't even look at them. Dragging several carcasses behind him, Fan Yue returned to the cave.
His eyes had once been deep and alive as a starlit sky — the same as Lan Yue's. Now they appeared empty. Cold. Nothing reflected in them, only a film.
He said his name softly, almost inaudibly.
"Fan Yue..."
The sound dissolved into the emptiness of the cave.
The pain the name caused was not sharp — it was crushing, dull, as though something heavy had settled on his chest and wouldn't allow him to breathe. The name no longer felt like his own.
He closed his lips. He didn't say it again.
From that day, everything changed.
Not sharply. Not suddenly.
Simply — at some point, he stopped fighting it.
As though something inside had broken and no longer tried to stand back up.
He walked out of the cave and killed.
Without plan. Without purpose. Without thought. He went farther and farther, not returning, wandering through rocks, ravines, and dead plains. The path had no direction — his body simply moved forward.
The black dogs no longer appeared.
Other creatures had taken their place.
Ten-meter dogs with three heads, whose jaws could bite through stone. Skeleton knights in darkened armor, wielding blades heavier than human bodies. Giant serpents as thick as boulders, with cold and unblinking eyes. Flying beasts whose wingbeats shattered mountains.
Any one of them should have been his death.
But Fan Yue killed.
Fighting and killing had become as natural to him as breathing. His body moved on its own, faster than thought.
Sometimes he came back to himself standing among torn bodies, with no memory of how the fight had begun or ended.
Swords broke.
Bones cracked.
Tendons tore.
He lost liters of blood. His body was covered in wounds so densely that there was no unmarked skin left on him.
But he kept going.
No cries. No rage. No hatred. No sorrow. No bitterness.
Day followed day.
Blood on his hands became familiar. The smell of death became known.
Wounds closed faster than he could register that they were there. He no longer felt pain.
He no longer asked "why." The question had lost its meaning.
He no longer hoped.
Hope required a future, and he no longer had one.
His face had settled into cold indifference.
And inside... there was no longer rage, no hatred, no sorrow, no despair.
Only emptiness.
One day he glanced down into a pool of blood and stopped.
A reflection looked back at him.
That face was expressionless, stained with blood, with empty eyes.
Fan Yue didn't recognize himself.
But he didn't care. He turned away.
With every step he forgot a little more.
Most of all, he forgot himself — losing his way among memories.
Fan Yue dissolved, as though he had never existed.
He simply walked forward.
Not for his family or friends.
Not for the past.
Not to take everything back.
Not even for revenge.
He didn't want to die. That was all.
Even the dreams no longer troubled him. When they came, he watched them with cold indifference — like someone else's memories, having nothing to do with him.
Ten years later.
A monster's roar tore across the desolate land.
"KHA-A-A-A-AH!!!"
The air shuddered as though space itself couldn't withstand that voice.
The monster was truly colossal. More than a hundred meters from head to tail, with a massive body like a mountain. Its flesh was covered in a strange mixture of dense black fur and grey-blue scales, as though the creature had been warped through dozens of distortions. Behind its back rose enormous membranous wings, each one like the sail of a warship.
A long neck was crowned by a wolf's head adorned with eight curved horns. Between them, electrical discharges danced and crackled, distorting the air.
R-r-r-r...
If the wolf's head had been a lizard's, it could have been mistaken for a dragon.
Before the monster stood a person.
A solidly built young man with long black hair tied back with a green strip of cloth. His body was bare to the waist — only short trousers made from animal hide covered his legs. Not a gram of excess flesh, every muscle dense and dry and refined, forged in countless battles.
This was a body that had long since crossed the boundary of human possibility.
The monster opened its jaws.
"FW-S-S-H-H-H!!!"
Crimson flame poured out, incinerating the earth. The ground melted, stone flowed like liquid metal. The force of the fire strike was so great it reshaped the landscape, instantly scorching hundreds of meters in every direction.
But the man did not falter.
He evaded easily — almost carelessly — as though he had known the attack's trajectory in advance. His feet pushed off the ground and he ran — not from the flame, but through the zone of destruction, using the brief safe gaps between tongues of fire.
There was no fear on his face.
For him, attacks capable of erasing a mountain had long since become ordinary.
The sharp rocks that had once surrounded him had long since been ground into rounded boulders. He had been fighting here so long that he had reshaped the landscape with his own battles.
The monster turned its head.
All eight horns blazed at once.
From them poured streams of light, flame, and lightning, weaving together into a single devastating beam.
The young man's face didn't move, remaining cold and composed.
He gripped the silver sword tightly and launched forward.
The earth exploded beneath his feet.
In one breath he covered hundreds of meters and appeared directly before the monster's attack.
"Cut."
The word came out quietly. Almost indifferently.
A swing.
The energy beam was split in two as though it were an illusion. Then the monster's body followed. The enormous creature separated into two halves, from head to tail, in a perfectly clean line.
A moment — and both halves crashed to the ground.
BOOM.
The impact shook the air, the shockwave driving into the mountains, sending stone avalanches cascading.
The young man landed calmly, as though he had just finished a routine training session.
He looked at the carcass, then spoke.
"And today... I survived."
He built a fire, split the monster's flesh with practiced movements, began roasting the meat and drinking the blood — thick, hot, overflowing with power and energy. His body accepted it without resistance, processed it, grew stronger.
"Well..." he said quietly. "Someday I'll get out of here."
He stared at the flame without expression.
"Yes. Someday I'll get out."
End of Volume One: Stolen Threads