Defiled Dao

When Shen Mo was seven, his father pulled him out of a dry well by the throat. His father’s eye sockets were empty. White worms crawled out of the two black holes, and something squirmed in his mouth. But in the end, the knife he had used to slaughter pigs for twenty years went into his own temple. Shen Mo survived for seven days among the corpses. When he was hungry, he ate. When he was thirsty, he drank urine. Later, a voice in his head asked, “Does it taste good?” Later still, men in black took him out of the city and said, “There’s something in your eyes watching you.” Shen Mo didn’t know what it was. He only knew that from that day on, his hand never shook when he killed. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to shake; he simply couldn’t. His heart felt frozen, impossible to warm no matter how tightly he held it. Only later did he learn the truth: there was no ascending to immortality in this world. There was only eating, and being eaten. The dantian was an egg planted by an Outer God, the nascent soul a youngling raised to maturity, and ascension meant washing yourself clean and delivering yourself into someone else’s mouth. But Shen Mo didn’t want to be eaten. Even if he was a monster, he would become a tough, gristly piece of meat, one that would give whoever swallowed him indigestion for the rest of their life.