Chronicles of a Madman Devouring the Dao

Shen Yantian, a servant disciple of the Qingming Sect, was born without a spiritual root. But in the forbidden grounds, he found the breathing Scripture of Shattered Souls. Blood seeped from its pages, and the words screamed. The instant he licked away a drop of blood, tentacle-like red markings crawled across his fingertips: the mark of one who devours spiritual roots. The sect’s ancient texts sprouted wings. Pus ran from cultivators’ eyes. Bai Lingxi’s Heart-Cleansing Mantra became an inverted chant, spitting out tentacles. Ye Qingyu’s sword wept faces, and copied its victims’ fingerprints whenever it cut them. As Shen Yantian devoured his fellow disciples’ spiritual roots, countless little hands applauded beneath his skin. He heard a hundred voices mixed into his laughter. When a flesh-and-blood altar swallowed the entire mountain sect, and ascension was revealed to be the process by which an evil god digested its prey, the cultivators finally understood: the so-called Great Dao was nothing more than making you smile as you dismantled yourself piece by piece, then reassembled you into something indescribable. And Shen Yantian stood atop a mountain of corpses, the red markings on his chest splitting open into a mouth as it gnawed at the last bone of his “humanity.”