House of Blood

The spatial rift to the Ancestral Plain did not tear open with a majestic burst of light. It ruptured like a swollen vein, vomiting a wave of iron-tasted wind into the subterranean courtyard. The air turned instantly sour, smelling of stagnant blood, rusted armor, and ancient, unburied marrow. Above, the sky visible through the tear was not dark; it was a bruised, heavy crimson that seemed to physically press down against the stone architecture of the Prim Sanguis estate.

Valerian stood at the edge of the threshold. His dark crimson silk robes fluttered violently in the spatial draft, the hem brushing against the base of his new S-Rank black chitin staff. Over his eyes, the northern silk blindfold remained perfectly taut, hiding the Sovereign’s Guilt Eyes beneath a mask of absolute, unbothered calm. Corvus and Lyra held their positions half a pace behind him, their postures rigid, their expressions carved from cold marble.

”The spatial anchor will hold for three seconds post-entry, Young Master,” Corvus said, his voice flat despite the spatial wind whipping his white gloves. ”Once we cross, the high-density blood mana will distort standard spatial tracking.”

”Perimeter suppression is ready,” Lyra added quietly, her fingers resting lightly inside her white apron, hovering over her phantom wire needles. ”We enter on your mark.”

Valerian didn’t speak. He merely tilted his head slightly, his mouth curved into his signature, pleasant, calculating smile.

”Step through,” he murmured smoothly.

They crossed the threshold as one.

THUMMMMM.

The world didn’t just shift; it buckled.

The moment Valerian’s boot touched the mud of the Ancestral Plain, a violent spatial tremor rippled through the local reality. The spatial rift behind them collapsed into a jagged needle of crimson light, and the atmospheric pressure hit like a falling mountain. The ground beneath Valerian fractured instantly. It wasn’t just raw physical gravity slamming into him—it was a localized spatial anomaly, a jagged, ancient tear in the plain’s corrupted ley lines.

”Young Master—!” Corvus’s voice rang out, instantly warped and stretched by the atmospheric distortion.

Before Corvus or Lyra could bridge the tiny gap between them, a surge of crimson spatial lightning tore through the air. The kinetic shockwave hurled both vassals backward, casting them into a dense, swirling shroud of dark red fog. Simultaneously, the earth beneath Valerian collapsed into a deep, jagged sinkhole, swallowing him whole.

Valerian plummeted thirty feet into the darkness, landing in a fluid, low-crouching stance atop a carpet of crushed, calcified bone.

He did not panic. He didn’t even drop his smile. He immediately extended his spatial awareness outward, anchoring his footing with his black chitin staff, calculating the structural geometry of the pit.

”Corvus. Lyra.”

Nothing.

The atmospheric corruption was so dense that his non-aura spatial perception hit a dead wall past thirty yards. He was completely isolated in the Valley of Whispering Bone.

’Valerian...’ Wren’s voice echoed directly within his inner sea, sharp, alert, and laced with immediate caution. ’Be careful. The atmosphere here isn’t just raw blood mana. It’s soaked in ancient, rotten intent. It’s crawling toward your core.’

”I noticed,” Valerian replied internally, his tone remaining light as he stood up, casually dusting the pale bone powder from his dark silk sleeves. ”A bit unrefined, but nothing my core can’t filter.”

He took three steps forward, intent on finding a path back up to the canyon ridge.

Then, the world stopped moving.

The blood-fog around him didn’t merely swirl; it liquefied. It seeped through the pores of his skin, bypassing his physical defenses, ignoring his non-aura leverage, and sliding directly past his Blood Dragon Core into the deepest, darkest corners of his psyche. It slid into his neural pathways like needles of frozen lead.

Valerian froze mid-stride.

’Valerian?’ Wren’s tone instantly lost its casual edge, turning sharp enough to draw blood. ’What’s wrong? Your pulse just spiked.’

Valerian couldn’t answer.

The northern blindfold still covered his physical face, but inside his mind, the dim red canyon vanished entirely. In its place, the heavy, metallic stench of fresh gore flooded his senses. The smell of burning siege engines, shattered iron, and severed limbs.

CLANG!

The thunderous, deafening sound of a heavy guillotine blade falling echoed directly inside his skull.

Valerian’s pleasant smile stiffened. His fingers tightened around his black chitin staff until his knuckles turned ghostly, bloodless white. Cold sweat burst across his forehead, soaking into his collar.

”No...” Valerian rasped aloud to the empty cavern, his voice suddenly lacking its smooth, melodic composure. ”A simple cognitive illusion caused by atmospheric neurotoxins.”

’A neurotoxin?’ a voice sneered.

It didn’t come from the fog. It didn’t come from Wren. It came from directly inside his own chest—a dark, rasping, hateful voice that sounded terrifyingly identical to his own, yet dripping with venom, bile, and years of bottled-up curse energy.

From the dark red mist in front of him, a figure slowly coalesced.

It was a boy.

A ten-year-old boy wearing torn, blood-soaked rags, his body covered in deep whip marks, chemical burns, and executioner’s brandings. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and filled with a suffocating, bottomless abyss of pure, unadulterated hatred. Around the boy’s neck was a jagged, black scar—the exact mark left by an imperial executioner’s iron blade.

It was his past self.

The useless ”trash” of the Prim Sanguis clan. The powerless outcast who had spent his entire first life believing his family despised him, who had died on the execution block framed for high treason, drowning in his own pathetic powerlessness.

’Look at you,’ the past self hissed, taking a slow, limping step forward. His voice echoed with the horrific weight of a ghost that refused to rot.

’Look at the fine, elegant Young Master. You wear fine silk. You carry an S-Rank staff. You walk with a pleasant little smile on your face as if you’re a god amongst men.’

”You are nothing but a residual memory construct,” Valerian said, his jaw locked tight as he tried to channel his Blood Dragon Core to burn the mist away. ”An echo of a life I have already discarded.”

’Discarded?!’ the past self screamed, the sound tearing through the canyon like a dying beast.

’YOU BURIED IT! You buried the humiliation! You buried the screams! You walk around pretending you’re an emotionless architect of shadows, but you’re still the same weak, blind, pathetic trash who sat in a dark dungeon waiting for someone to save him!’

The past self lunged forward, not with a blade, but with its bare, bloody hands, clawing at the air.

’Do you remember the execution block, Valerian?!’ the ghost shrieked into his mind, forcing the vivid, brutal memories to flood his vision.

’Do you remember the cold iron against your neck? Do you remember looking up at the sky, cursing your father, cursing your blood, wishing the whole world would burn into ash?! YOU SWORE VOWS OF VENGEANCE! You swore you would make the imperial dogs bleed! You swore you would tear down the empire!’

”I am executing a calculated reformation,” Valerian gritted out, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.

He raised his staff, attempting to execute a mechanical strike to shatter the illusion.

”Step back.”

’REFORMATION?!’ the ghost laughed hysterically, a sound so dry and painful it sounded like bones grinding together.

’You’re negotiating trade permits with your father! You’re playing politics with Icarus! The man who left us in the dark! You smile at the siblings who let us rot! You’re soft! You’re weak! You forgot the blood!’

The past self’s shadow expanded, corrupting the air around Valerian.

Suddenly, the phantom vision shifted, plunging Valerian into the absolute worst moment of his existence—the moment the heavy iron blade dropped.

He saw them.

Through the haze of his past life’s final seconds, he saw his six elder siblings. The six ruthless, monster-like warlords led by his terrifying eldest sister, the Death Mistress.

He saw them breaking through an army of ten thousand imperial knights, covered in their own blood, screaming his name in absolute, suicidal desperation.

He saw his eldest sister’s face, pale and weeping, reaching out her hand to grab him just as the guillotine blade severed his spine.

They hadn’t hated him.

They had loved him fiercely all along.

And he had died believing they despised him, leaving them to fall right beside his execution block.

The sheer, suffocating weight of that realization—the crushing guilt of his past life’s ignorance—hit Valerian’s chest like a physical mountain.

”Ah... gh...!”

Valerian fell to his knees.

The S-Rank black chitin staff clattered against the bone-littered ground.

His eyes, hidden beneath the silk blindfold, flared with the Sovereign’s Guilt Eyes, but there was no enemy in front of him to direct the lethality toward.

The power turned inward, gnawing at his own soul, feeding on the absolute, poisonous regret surging through his blood.

’VALERIAN!’ Wren’s scream echoed violently in his core.

She manifested her ethereal dragon-wings within his inner sea, desperately trying to construct a mental barrier to shield his mind from the plain’s corruption.

’VALERIAN, STOP IT! IT’S FEEDING ON YOUR GUILT! IT’S WEAPONIZING YOUR PAST LIFE AGAINST YOU!’

”Wren...” Valerian rasped, his hands digging into the sharp, calcified bone fragments on the cavern floor. His fingers bled, crimson dripping down onto the pale dust.

”I... I thought I buried it. I thought... if I calculated everything... if I became perfect...”

’You didn’t bury it, you fool!’ his past self roared, stepping directly over his kneeling form, placing a cold, ghostly foot on Valerian’s shoulder, pressing him face-first into the dirt.

’You hid behind a blindfold! You hid behind your non-aura theories! But beneath it all, you are still the boy who watched his family die because he was too weak to save them!’

A surge of corrupted, blood-red mana erupted from the walls of the canyon.

A physical, S-Rank Blood-Spine Beast—drawn by the overwhelming stench of Valerian’s breaking spirit—emerged from the dark mist above the pit.

It was a terrifying, insectoid predator made of hardened chitin and serrated blades, its crimson eyes fixed on the defenseless, kneeling boy.

It lunged down, its serrated leg slashing through the air toward Valerian’s neck.

In any normal scenario, Valerian would have calculated its trajectory in a millisecond and shattered its joints with his staff.

But now, he couldn’t move.

His body was paralyzed by the suffocating weight of his past self’s accusations.

He felt lost.

He felt hopeless.

The cold, logical strategist was gone, replaced by a terrified, broken ten-year-old child drowning in a sea of blood and unfulfilled curses.

SLASH!

The beast’s blade cut deep into Valerian’s back.

Blood sprayed across the white bones. Valerian gasped, a horrific, strangled sound escaping his throat as he was slammed sideways into the dirt. His silk robes ripped open, soaked in red.

’VALERIAN!’ Wren’s soul-bond violently flared.

Within his core, her ethereal form writhed in agony as she felt his physical skin tear and his mental sea shatter.

She burned a fraction of her own sealed dragon marrow, desperately trying to force his limbs to move.

’GET UP! MOVE! PLEASE, VALERIAN, DON’T LET IT KILL YOU HERE!’

Valerian lay in the dirt, blood trickling from his lips, his northern blindfold partially torn, revealing a sliver of his glowing, crimson-gold eyes underneath.

He looked at his bloody hands—the hands of a boy who had died once in disgrace, and was now bleeding to death in the mud of the Ancestral Plain.

”I... I can’t...” Valerian whispered into the dark, his voice trembling violently, completely stripped of all pleasant pretenses.

”Wren... it’s right. I’m... I’m still trapped on that execution block.”

Above him, the Blood-Spine Beast raised its twin scythes for the killing strike, while the phantom of his past self stood over him, laughing madly as the dark fog began to swallow him whole.