A dark epic with a slow burn. Take your time reading it~
Corruption poisons the world; the flesh becomes an abyss.
Across the Blackblight Wasteland, corrupted beasts run rampant, while living creatures’ skin rots and their bones pierce through torn flesh. This is the Calamity of Corruption, a chaotic force that devours the forms of all things. When the seals around the outskirts of Sky Abyss Peak shattered, the world began sliding into an abyss of decay. Only the “Anomalous” feared by all stood on the brink of extinction.
They bear curses, yet wield power:
· The Silver-Scale Guards cover themselves in black armor and rend the sky with their scale-blades, but must use medicines to suppress their bloodlines from running wild.
· The Blazing Butterfly Guards burn evil to ash with flames that consume the world, but beneath their red butterfly markings, their organs are burning too.
· The Rock Guards turn their bodies into mountain-like ramparts, at the cost of their flesh and blood becoming stone, inch by inch, forever.
· The Pure Guards heal wounds and cleanse corruption with holy light, but wherever their light spots pass, their own life force slips away like sand...
The Nine Guards’ battered bodies are all battlefields. Red blotches, scales, abyssal waters, light spots: these various “skin anomalies” are curses carved into their marrow by corruption, and blades pointed into the darkness.
Yet a lone lamp is easily snuffed out, while a multitude of flames can set the plains ablaze.
When a traitor tears open a rift into the abyss and the “Corruption Lord” opens its eyes,
Mo Zheng shields the others with his silver scales, Shi Mang turns himself into a stone barrier, You Quan swallows poison and becomes an abyss, and A Qi burns his soul and falls into shadow...
They use their crumbling bodies as kindling and their bonds as lamp wicks,
rekindling the ultimate secret of The Nine Skin Aspects before the source of life is extinguished:
“Let the Nine Hearts return to their places, and eternally seal Sky Abyss!”
After the battle:
Stone statues stand forever atop the peak, an ice coffin preserves the one who succumbed to corruption, and light spots scatter into a river of stars.
The survivors pick up the broken pieces of their “anomalies” and rekindle the lamps in their hearts amid the ruins.
For they know that protection never ends,
and coexisting with disease is the way humanity endures.
