Chương 26: Chapter 23 – Ashen Baptism

The burning didn't stop. Cade lay curled beneath the dome, his knees drawn tight to his chest, every muscle locked in a desperate attempt to hold himself together. His skin felt flayed. Every inch of him throbbed like it had been peeled open and pressed against a furnace wall. The pain refused to plateau; it clawed upward, steadily, relentlessly, a horizon that kept receding no matter how far he staggered toward it. His breath came shallow, harsh. What little air he managed to pull in tasted like metal and dust.

Then the pain changed as it sank deeper within him. At first it was just a deeper ache, like the burn on his skin had found a fissure and slid inside. But then it crept further—down past muscle, past tissue, past places pain had ever belonged. A hiss tore from Cade's teeth as the sensation burrowed into him. The burning wrapped around his ribs, pried through his chest, and tugged at his spine. His nerves lit up in frantic, discordant pulses.

His vision stuttered behind his squeezed eyelids—bright flares of white and black alternating like a strobe light. He wanted to scream but he didn't dare. Not with that Emperor somewhere out there in the storm. Not with a creature capable of reducing mountains of flesh to vapor that close. If he screamed loud enough for it to hear— He bit his own arm to clamp the sound down, teeth grinding through the pain. But the ash didn't care. White powdery ash still slipped beneath the dome in thin, insistent streams.

It crawled over his legs, his hips, along his back, and across his face. Not drifting—seeking. Moving with intent. Curling up his nostrils, slipping between cracked lips, clinging to the corners of his eyes. And then it pushed deeper. Cade felt it invade. The ash was moving into him, down his throat and into his lungs with each ragged inhale. Into his stomach with every involuntary swallow. He could feel it crawling deeper and deeper.. The moment it hit his bloodstream, everything exploded.

White‑hot agony ripped through him. His insides boiled. His bowels turned watery and he puked a thick stream of black, viscous sludge that splattered against the shell's curved inner wall. A heartbeat later his lower half spasmed and more tar-like filth spilled out beneath him. His chest seized. His back arched involuntarily. His limbs jerked in sharp, uncontrolled spasms as if the ash were carving tunnels through his flesh, excavating him from the inside. Pins and needles erupted into an inferno in his arms.

His legs burned as if veins were being melted and remade. Something pulsed behind his sternum. His spine thrummed with a deep, burning ache. He pressed his forehead against the ash-slick ground, breath shattering in jagged gasps. He tried to rasp but no sound truly left his shredded throat. I need to live. I need to survive this. He thought The storm outside roared. Wind battered the dome like a beast trying to tear him from his hiding place.

More ash flowed in, swirling around him, clinging to him, merging with the black filth already coating his skin. His lungs spasmed and ash rushed into him again. He coughed, choked, gagged—and more black ooze spilled from his mouth. His throat burned as if being scraped raw from the inside. His head spun. His vision flickered in and out. The pain surged again—deeper now as pain erupted from even his bones.

A pressure built inside his chest, squeezing his heart until each beat felt like a hammer striking him from within. Something buzzed along his spine. His fingertips tingled. His toes went numb. Heat and cold collided inside him like battling currents, boiling then freezing then boiling again. Cade's hands clawed helplessly at the floor. The ash under his fingers shifted. His body twitched violently, muscles jumping without permission. His mind frayed around the edges. Even as something tugged at his awareness.

Cade's fingers spasmed against the ground, scraping through ash and sludge until they brushed something solid. The sensation sparked a half-remembered thought, dragged up from beneath the pain. The cores. The ones he'd taken from the Lords of the Swamp. Panic flared weakly. With shaking effort, he clawed at the ruined remains of his armor and spilled its contents into the ash. Two stones tumbled free. The first was jet black—darker than night, darker than the onyx scales of the serpent it had come from.

Lord N'zhal's core. It should have swallowed light. Instead, its surface crawled with pale streaks as ash clung to it. Fine cracks spiderwebbed across the darkness, glowing faintly white before the glow collapsed inward. The core shuddered once then began to flake, black fragments lifting away before dissolving into dust.

"No—" Cade tried to rasp, but the sound died in his throat. The second core rolled against his palm as if seeking him out. Tegziran's soft green, almost white, core was glowing gently even now. For a heartbeat, it resisted. The glow brightened, pulsing as if alive, as if trying to hold itself together. Then the ash began devouring. The green light dimmed steadily. Hairline fractures spread through the core's surface, leaking pale luminescence that the ash eagerly devoured.

The glow thinned, flickered, and finally guttered out entirely. What remained crumbled in Cade's hand, collapsing into a fine, lifeless powder that slipped between his fingers and vanished into the white. Gone. Both of them were gone. Those cores had been proof he had defeated the Lords and the ash had taken them as easily as it had taken his armor, his dagger, and his strength. The ash didn't care what something was. Only that it could be consumed.

Cade's vision blurred completely as another wave of agony rolled through him, erasing thought, memory, and regret alike. Not here. Don't break. Don't give in. Don't— His thoughts shattered as another spike of pain ripped through him, bright and sharp and blinding. The storm's howl dimmed. The pressure behind his eyes pulsed as his breath hitched and his consciousness slipped, unraveling like fraying cloth. Cade lay there, half-curled, half-sprawled, twitching as the waves of ash‑driven agony pulsed through him.

Darkness held him for a long time. Not the void of the violet eye nor the dreamless numb of a drunken blackout during a college rager. This darkness felt thick—like a blanket soaked in cold tar—heavy enough that Cade had to claw his way up through it. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. When he finally surfaced, the first thing he noticed was the silence. Just a dead, hollow stillness. Then came the pain.

A deep, throbbing ache radiated from every inch of his body, but it was nothing compared to the inferno from before. This pain felt survivable. Like the aftermath of something catastrophic rather than the catastrophe itself. His skull pulsed. A pounding headache hammered behind his eyes, each throb sending a wave of nausea through him. Cade groaned and shifted. The motion smeared something thick and tacky across his chest. That was when the smell hit him.

"—oh God." He gagged. It was the worst thing he'd ever smelled. Worse than the summer Cade forgot his gym bag in the trunk and opened it a week later to find his socks fermenting into a biological weapon. Worse than the time his college roommate tried—and failed—to make homemade kimchi in a plastic bin and left it stewing under his bed for two months. And far worse than the half-rotting corpse of a deer he and his father had stumbled across during one of their yearly camping trips.

This was a suffocating blend of bile, sourness, iron, and something chemical and rotten—like fermented sewage marinated in battery acid. It clawed up his nostrils and coated the back of his throat. He retched dryly, but there was nothing left in him to throw up. The sticky layer clinging to him—the black bile all around—that reek came from him. He lifted a trembling hand and felt the crusted mixture coating his skin. Ash mixed with congealed fluids and whatever else had come out of him.

It clung like tar—tacky and horribly slick all at once. For a moment, there was only the stench, the silence, and the distant hum of pain echoing through his nerves. Then— DING! You have endured the Ashen Baptism. Complete the rite to continue body tempering. Complete the rite? His eyes unfocused for a moment, struggling to make sense of the System notification. But he was too dazed, too drained to understand. The words body tempering lodged in his foggy mind.

It sounded familiar, important even, but he couldn't quite place it. Not with everything so hazy. He closed the notification with a sluggish thought. His vision cleared slightly, enough to see the interior of the dome. He froze. It looked… bigger. Not physically, but there was more room around him. Where he'd once been curled tight against the curved walls, he now had space between his limbs and the dome's inner curves. Did it expand? His fuzzy brain couldn't latch onto any logical explanation.

Maybe the ash had been piled thicker than he realized. Maybe the storm had hollowed the space out more. Cade shoved the thought away before it could form fully. He planted his palm against the slick floor and pushed. His arm trembled violently. His shoulder screamed. But he forced himself upright, dragging his filthy body toward the dome's opening. Each movement peeled crusted patches of goo from his skin. It came away in sticky strings that snapped back against him. His knees wobbled and his breath shook.

But he crawled and clawed his way out, desperate to escape the stench and the claustrophobic heat trapped beneath the shell. He hauled himself free, and at last, cool air touched his face. The light outside was dim—soft blue and pale gold—as the sun hovered low across a landscape that had transformed beyond recognition. Cade pushed himself to his feet, unsteady, and stared. The dunes were gone. Completely wiped away.

Where rolling hills of white had once stretched endlessly, there was now only a vast, cracked plain—a flat expanse hardened as if fused by unimaginable heat. The ground was a mosaic of pale plates and thin fissures, each segment brittle but solid beneath his bare feet. Cade crouched and touched the surface. The storm hadn't just passed through—it had devoured the dunes. Pulled them up and compacted whatever remained into a barren ivory desert.

"The whole landscape…" he whispered, voice ragged.

"Gone." His gaze drifted back to the dome behind him. Fully revealed now, no longer buried, it gleamed bone-white in the fading light. Sunlight traced the weathered ridges across its back, each groove and plate catching a dim, pearly shine. It looked ancient. Worn. Beautiful in a stark, brutal way. Recognition struck him like a jolt. It was a shell just like the Ashen Emperor's, only not as massive, but unmistakably cut from the same lineage. Cade reached to lift it—and froze.

He looked at his hand for the first time. Truly saw what he had become after the ash had its way with him. His breath stuttered. His fingers were thin. Skeletal. The skin stretched tight over bony knuckles, smeared with streaks of congealed black goo. His wrist looked wrong—too narrow, like half of the mass had been carved away. He looked down. His entire body was a horror. Every rib visible. Hips jutting sharply. Thighs little more than twigs wrapped in brittle skin.

His abdomen hollowed out like he'd been starved for weeks on end. His flesh streaked in chalky white and oily black. His voice cracked.

"How am I alive?" He fumbled for his Status screen as his mind tried to focus on the most important section. HP: 18 / 270 SP: 4 / 240 MP: 0 / 260 Cade let out a breath that violently shook his entire body. He was basically a corpse. His mind scrambled to make sense of the numbers. The ash had eaten his body so of course it drained his HP. Fighting it off must have drained SP too. But MP? Why did he have zero mana? He had never used mana, every time he checked before it was always full.

He didn't even know how to use mana. The System itself said mana was for expressing energy outside the body, and Cade hadn't done anything close to that. So why was it zero? Did the ash eat that too? he thought, horrified that something was able to consume him so thoroughly. His mind spiraled with questions. How could ash corrode mana? What was mana made of? What was the ash made of? How was he supposed to learn anything when he didn't even have a Class or Profession to go from?

He pressed trembling hands against his face, smearing more black sludge down his gaunt cheeks. He had too many questions and not nearly enough answers. Cade's eyes drifted again to the dome, the shell that had shielded him from the brunt of the storm. It had held together even while his gear had disintegrated. Even the metal dagger had dissolved to dust. But this thing? It had somehow remained. Not a single crack ran across its surface. No corrosion or any sign of damage.

The same dull ivory gleam it had when he first uncovered it still shimmered in the fading light. Cade hobbled back to it. The world spun slightly as he moved, but he pushed through it, one hand bracing his emaciated side. His legs felt like they were barely strong enough to support him. His fingers gripped the outer ridge. It lifted surprisingly easily. Lighter than he expected. Much lighter, given how solid it looked and how frail he felt. The outer surface was ridged and bumpy.

Up close Cade could see the tiny grooves—natural etchings formed by years of wind, ash, and heat. The underside was darker, more matte, with subtle ridges and depressions shaped by long-gone anatomy. At the center of the concave side, a single bony protrusion jutted downward, curved like a hooked handle. The thing that had scraped at his back when he'd crawled in. He reached for it and his hand slid naturally into place. It almost fit.

His fingers curled around the protrusion, but the grip felt loose—his hand too narrow, too gaunt to fill it properly. Yet there were grooves there, shallow contours shaped to cradle muscle and bone. He could feel it—if he still had the bulk he'd lost, if his body hadn't been stripped down to skin and sinew, the fit would've been perfect. Cade blinked. He was naked, reeking, emaciated, and exposed to a world that had already tried to kill him many times over.

He had no armor or weapons, so he gripped the only thing left: the shell that had acted as his shelter. His fingers tightened around the handle as he pulled it close, pressing the curved surface against his chest. It was his now. The ash hadn't claimed it and if he had any say in the matter—it wouldn't claim him either. The light was almost gone. What little sun remained bled orange across the sky, spilling warmth that didn't reach Cade's skin.

He turned, the shell clutched tightly in his arms, and cast one last look toward the horizon—toward the direction the Ashen Emperor had vanished, where the storm still churned in the far distance, fading opposite the setting sun. He adjusted his grip. His scrawny form twitched with fatigue, joints stiff and raw. The handle beneath the shell's belly nestled into his palm, and as he shifted, the curved surface slid naturally along his forearm and shoulder. Then he turned his back on the storm's remnants.

The white-cracked ground crunched beneath his bare feet. He walked slowly at first, unsteady and lightheaded, the shell hugged close. With each step, the wind kissed his raw skin—but it no longer carried the same corrupting malice it once had when it rode in with ash. He didn't know where he was going. There was no path or sign he would find an end to this white hell, only the dim orange bleed of the dying sun and the endless white plain stretching beyond it.

The air grew colder as the last of the warmth drained from the sky, but Cade kept walking into the night.