A spatial crack tore through the area, and a 13-year-old boy was thrown from its jagged maw. He was gravely injured, barely able to hold himself up. Both hands were mangled, feeling like little more than dangling flesh.
As if his strength had finally failed, he knelt. Yet, the confusion cut deeper than his wounds: despite the horrific injuries, not a single drop of blood flowed from his body. It was as if all his blood had been drained.
His name was David. His mother was a powerful Universe Lord, and he was once considered a genius of his family. Yet, she had never cared for him, treating him like something untouchable. Still, he clung to the hope of earning her recognition.
From an early age, he strove to do everything in his power. He even forged himself into a warrior, hoping it might make her see him. That hope had briefly flickered brighter when he broke through to the Star Realm.
A few years ago, his mother had visited the ancestral house where he had lived his entire life. Spotting her from a distance just as she was about to leave, he saw her pause. She seemed to remember something and tossed a token toward him. He had believed it was a lifeline, a one-time protective charm for mortal danger.
Who could have predicted that during a routine hunting game—a contest to gather resources for his cultivation—it would prove useless? He often participated in these hunts; without them, he would receive no resources for the entire year. But this time was different. A group ambushed him, shattered his arms, and used a strange device to drain the blood from his body. As they moved in for the kill, he clutched the token, his final hope.
No shield erupted. No counterattack lashed out. The last vestige of hope shattered just as they struck. Then, as death reached for him, space itself fractured before his eyes, swallowing him and spitting him out… here.
David, devoid of energy, slumped to his knees. It took a few seconds for his vision to clear enough to see it: a monstrous corpse, mountain-sized, lying before him. At first, he thought it was sleeping, but then he saw the river of blood flowing from its massive head. Despair washed over him. Was heaven against him? To survive one hell only to be delivered to another?
The monster's body was so vast his eyes couldn't take it all in. He had no strength to run. Even if he did, how far could a wounded boy go?
As David stared at the colossal carcass, a strange impulse gripped him. He didn't know where he found the will to stand, but he began to move toward the creature's head. There, he found a vast pond of its blood.
As he neared the crimson pool, his consciousness blurred. He could hold on no longer. He pitched forward, plunging into the depths. As his body sank, David felt an unexpected, eternal peace, as if this was his final moment.
He fell into a dream. His mother was there, bringing his sister to meet him for the first time. Even his father, whom he had never heard from, had come. They were all together, a happy family. While David basked in that imaginary peace, his physical reality was a battlefield for existence.
The blood in that pond—blood that could kill a monster of the Venerable Realm—was not something a 13-year-old boy's body could withstand. It began to erode him, dissolving his flesh.
But then, something astonishing happened. As his body eroded, his bones began to emit a green, liquid light. It repaired him, over and over, in a brutal cycle of destruction and rebirth. An unfathomable darkness, capable of eroding all things, began to seep from his pores, while a simultaneous, profound vitality surged within him—a law that could both destroy and preserve.
The vast blood pond, large enough to be a lake, began to shrink, bit by bit, absorbed into his tiny form. The visible darkness around him expanded rapidly. The monstrous corpse itself began to decompose, or rather, to be devoured by that same emerging darkness.
At the same time, in the Human Association Headquarters…
A woman sat with a six-year-old girl, teaching her. The girl laughed, but the woman's expression suddenly changed. She had sensed the token she gave to David. Just as she prepared to move, a voice transmission rang in her mind, instructing her not to interfere in "junior matters."
This was Matilda, David's mother, a powerful Universe Master and a pillar of the human race. The girl was Carla, her daughter and chosen heir.
She would never have imagined that the blood she shared with David—the only thing that connected them—had been drained. Before that horror could settle, the sense of her son's impending death struck her. A primal intuition in her own blood screamed.
She could not help herself. She tore through space, arriving at the hunting ground.
What she saw froze her: four men holding capsules filled with blood, and the token she gave David discarded on the ground. Fury threatened to consume her, but first, she needed truth. She rewound the local flow of time and witnessed the scene.
She saw David, surrounded by four stronger men, being beaten savagely. She saw a machine clamp onto him, siphoning his blood as he cried for help that never came. In his final desperation, he produced the token. It lay inert. Then, two men stomped on his outstretched hands—the crack of bone was audible even through time.
With his blood drained, the men prepared the final blow. Then, a spatial crack erupted. Startled, they faltered. David, with his last iota of strength, crawled toward that rift. His broken hand still clutched the token. He looked at it—once a symbol of cherished hope, now a testament to cruel betrayal. With immense pain, he threw it aside, letting go of his last hope for family, and hurled himself into the crack.
Witnessing this, Matilda trembled. She felt David's heart break at that moment. The physical agony hadn't broken him, but the token's silence did. She had broken him.
Matilda turned to the four men. She didn't let them speak. She ripped the memories from their minds and discovered the vile truth: her own family had ordered this. They believed her neglect of David meant she despised him. They thought by removing him—draining the "unworthy" blood—she would return home more often.
There were more involved. One was the elder who had sent the voice transmission, labeling it a "junior fight." Another was a cousin who devised the plan to transplant her bloodline into himself, believing it would ease his path to power. Killing David was his direct order.
Matilda executed the four without a blink. As her rage prepared to scourge her entire family line, an old man appeared. He spoke to her quietly. Whatever he said made her wrath recede, though it did not vanish. She tried to locate David through their blood connection, but something powerful was interfering, shielding him completely. Frustrated and grieving, she had no choice but to leave.
As Matilda departed, she failed to notice a pair of eyes observing everything from the void. They watched, and then vanished as if never there.
Meanwhile, back in the Forbidden Secret Realm…
David, within the blood pond, began to stir. Agony was his first sensation of life. The pond, once larger than a football field, had shrunk into a dense sphere of energy contained within his body.
He didn't know how long he was in a coma. As his consciousness surfaced, he felt his body—completely repaired, pulsating with automatic, profound power. His cultivation, once at the 3rd level of the Star Realm, had skyrocketed to the 9th level.
"I'm… not dead?" he whispered, voice raw. "I was scraped empty. There was no blood left. What happened?"
He looked around. The gargantuan monster corpse had utterly decomposed, bones and all, as if devoured by the very darkness. A deep fear gripped him as he scanned the hellish landscape—a desolate, ruined planet with dark red soil soaked in ancient blood, littered with the wreckage of spaceships.
Just as he began to move toward a nearby debris field, a voice echoed directly in his mind, ancient and resonant:
"Successor."