Prologue(Important,Read This)

The field was already Crimson Red

Lian stood in the middle of it and made himself look. An arm lay a few paces from his boot, torn off at the shoulder. Bone stuck out of the meat in white splinters. The fingers were still half-closed, like they’d been reaching for something when it happened.

A head sat farther off, face turned up. One eye was gone. The other had filmed over. The mouth was open in a scream that never finished.

The rest was scattered. Ribs split open. Guts steamed in the cold. A length of spine still clung to a chunk of hip that had been dragged through the dirt, leaving a long dark smear. Something that might have been a lung was flattened under a footprint, leaking.

The grass had turned black-red. The ground under it was soaked so deep it would stay that color for a long time.

He didn’t remember all of it. He remembered the start. The middle always disappeared now. What stayed was the smell iron, opened gut, shit and the blood drying under his nails. A scrap of skin still stuck to his left palm. He scraped it off with his thumbnail and let it drop.

He hated how little it cost him to look.

That scared him more than the killing. Not that he could do this. That he could stand here and feel almost nothing. A thin disgust came and went. He waited for the old horror, the kind that used to drop him to his knees. It never arrived. Under the numbness sat a small, hot anger. He couldn’t tell who it was for. The man on the ground. Himself. The book. Maybe all of them.

He looked at his own hand.

A thin dark scar sat near the base of his thumb. It had never healed right. He pressed it out of habit. Nothing answered. The thread under the skin had gone quiet years ago, or he had simply stopped noticing when it moved.

He took the book out of his robe.

"Devour."

The word came out flat. He had said it so many times it barely felt like language anymore. Just a switch he flipped.

The air in front of him folded. A crease opened in nothing. Something stepped through that the world had never made space for. It wasn’t big. That was the worst part. It didn’t need to be.

It crossed the distance without hurry. A mouth opened wider than any mouth should. The arm went first, pulled in with a wet sound. Then the head, still locked in its unfinished scream. The guts followed, stretched tight for a second before vanishing. Even the dark stain on the ground lifted and disappeared, like the earth itself was being emptied.

The crease sealed. The field went quiet in a way that felt worse than the noise.

Power hit him a moment later. It never felt like strength. It felt like being forced into a shape that had never fit and had stopped trying. Somewhere deep under everything, a part of him was still screaming. It had been screaming for a long time. Most days he couldn’t hear it anymore. He almost envied that part. It was the only piece of him that still seemed afraid.

He stood there with the book in his hand, watching wind move through grass that had gone the wrong color. A few scraps of bone and a single tooth lay near his boot. He kicked them into the dirt and waited until he couldn’t see them anymore.

He no longer knew which parts of his life had actually happened and which ones he had invented just to keep going. He no longer knew if the boy who once ran from a stranger crying in a parking lot was the same person standing here, or just a story he used to tell himself.

The madness is eating me, he thought. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. I can’t tell what is real or fake not like I care about it anymore

This is the chronicles of Chen Lian who rose from a ordinary teenager to the path of Godhood