The ruins still smoldered.
Ash drifted across the hollow bones of the city, and the scent of scorched zen and burnt metal clung to the air like death's veil. Zhen Hu stood atop the fractured remains of a spirit monument, its core long devoured by Humanios corruption. Blood painted his sleeves, most of it not his own. Yet the cuts that laced his flesh pulsed with more than pain—they pulsed with clarity.
He stared into the heart of the devastation, watching shadowed figures skitter between the broken structures. The Humanios were organizing, no longer treating him as a passing anomaly. They knew his name now.
And that meant only one thing: they feared him.
Aelira's voice, soft and sharp like an obsidian blade wrapped in silk, crackled through his thoughts. "You've drawn too much attention. They know what you are."
Zhen Hu exhaled slowly. "They don't know anything. Not yet."
She paused, then answered, "They've begun calling you 'Fleshkindler.' They think you command the Forbidden Flesh."
He grimaced. The term made his skin crawl, but perhaps it was true. The beasts he had felled bore the marks—bodies disintegrated not by Zen or Nytherion, but by something deeper, something rawer. Something ancient that whispered through his bones in combat, in silence, in rage.
And yet he still could not fully control it.
"I need to find their leader," Zhen Hu said aloud.
Aelira's voice sharpened. "Do you even know what you're searching for? The Humanios don't have conventional hierarchies like cultivator sects. Their 'leader' might be a corrupted Core-Ascendant, or worse—a Fleshbinder."
He turned his eyes north, where the taint in the zenstream thickened, where the sky itself seemed to blacken. "Then I'll carve my way through until something stops me."
Aelira fell silent.
Zhen Hu leapt from the shattered monument, landing with a whisper against the ruined road. As he walked, his perception expanded, tuning into the vibrations of the earth beneath him. His cultivation base had stabilized after the endless battles—he could feel the coalescence of his Aethonix realm, the whisper of a looming barrier ahead. He hadn't yet reached the Ascendant threshold, but the gate stirred.
He passed corpses. Both Humanios and corrupted civilians. Some twitched, still mutating long after death. Others had faces twisted in agony, mouths sewn shut by dark zen threads.
A flicker of motion caught his eye.
He darted toward the alleyway, silent as shadow. A girl—a cultivator, young, robe torn and eyes wide with panic—pressed against the wall, clutching a shattered blade.
"I won't go back!" she hissed, thrusting the broken weapon forward as if it still held power.
Zhen Hu didn't speak. Instead, he extended his perception—Kyrekh-level Zen, unstable. Bruised core. Weak.
"I'm not your enemy," he said. "What's your name?"
The girl hesitated. "Shaen."
He glanced at the talisman in her hair—it was cracked, but bore the seal of a fallen sect.
"What happened to your sect?"
"They came. The Humanios. Took everyone. Corrupted the old masters, turned the elders into vessels. I escaped."
He studied her for a long moment. "You're not safe here."
"I know," she snapped. "But I can't leave. My brother is still alive. They're using him to grow something in the Inner Chambers. Something vile."
Zhen Hu's jaw clenched.
Aelira stirred. "This is it. The trail you've been waiting for."
He nodded.
"Take me there," he said to Shaen.
She looked uncertain, but something in his eyes broke through her fear. She nodded slowly.
They moved like ghosts through the city. Zhen Hu killed three more scouts, effortlessly dispatching them with moves now burned into his muscle from combat. Ghost Step. Void Strike. Partial memory from ancient bones. He hadn't mastered the Forbidden Flesh yet—but it was listening.
By dusk, the shadows stretched long over the Inner Chambers—a subterranean hive of dark zen and pulsing fleshlight. It reeked of mutation. Of rot.
They crept closer.
Zhen Hu's eyes narrowed. "They're waiting."
A dozen Humanios cultivators encircled the entrance—some twisted beyond recognition, others still eerily human. All of them were staring at him.
Their leader had spoken his name.
The hunt had begun.
And Zhen Hu, the Fleshkindler, stepped forward.