Ren Tai's life was a flame flickering at the edge of extinction.
Each shallow breath barely fed it. Each heartbeat — ragged, uneven — was a whisper fighting the crushing silence pressing in. His body lay broken across jagged stone, blood dark and slow, spreading like sorrow into the abyss below, He had landed, not at the Abyss's heart, but on a jagged cliff that jutted like a cruel mockery of mercy — suspended between survival and an endless fall to the abyss below him ...he didn't know if his luck was good…or if it just meant more suffering…
The Screaming Abyss.
A cursed chasm with no bottom, no mercy, no light. It was a place where sanity unraveled and memory bled into madness. The screams weren't merely sounds — they were presence. Wills crushed and twisted into echoes. They burrowed into Ren Tai's skull, whispering guilt, despair, betrayal.
"Why did she leave you?"
"Why were you ever born?"
"Why didn't you fight harder?"
Their voices dripped like poison. Eating at his mind.
Ren Tai could barely think, let alone move. His limbs had gone numb. His spiritual core shattered. His meridians ruptured. The world — the sect, Sarah, everything — had faded into a haze of pain and broken breath.
And the fire of his life was shrinking. Dimming. Almost gone.
Is this it? Is this where it ends?
Not in vengeance or glory, but abandoned and discarded — forgotten by the world and swallowed by screams.
Then a voice — one not from the Abyss — slithered through the dark.
"Still breathing? Barely. But your soul… yes… that will do."
Something vast stirred in the shadows. A soul — old, cold, and immortal — rose like mist around him.
Golden eyes gleamed in the dark, twin embers of eternal hunger.
The being was no longer flesh, yet its presence weighed heavier than mountains. It had been sealed here long ago, its body lost, its will preserved in fragments. It had waited for a body to devour — a vessel strong enough to bear its power.
Ren Tai, though half-dead, would do.
"You won't feel a thing," the voice cooed, like a lullaby soaked in venom. "Sleep now, little candle. I'll wear your soul like a mask."
The immortal soul dove into him like a spear, threading itself through his weakened spirit, reaching toward his core.
"Die."
But —
Something stirred in Ren Tai's soul.
A pulse. A flare. A breath of heat in the void.
The Crimson Cauldron.
It had lain hidden, dormant within the depths of his spirit. For years, it had remained still — watching, waiting. Bonded to him not by chance, but by blood. By fate.
And now, in his moment of oblivion —
It awakened.
Ancient sigils flared across his inner world, runes older than time carved themselves into the walls of his soul. The immortal invader froze as the cauldron slowly, inexorably, began to open.
A deep crimson light spilled forth. Fire, but not just any flame — this was soul-fire. The essence of destruction, purification, and rebirth.
"What… no — NO!" the immortal soul screamed.
But it was too late.
The Cauldron roared.
And it devoured.
The invading soul was torn apart. It thrashed like a wounded dragon, its voice becoming an unending shriek as the Cauldron's crimson flames licked its essence, unraveling centuries of scheming into ash. Screams of rage and terror echoed through Ren Tai's soul-sea as the Cauldron consumed every fragment — essence, will, memory. Until nothing remained.
Then the flame turned inward.
It didn't just heal Ren Tai. It remade him.
The fire spread from his soul to his flesh, flowing outward in molten waves. Bones cracked and snapped back into place. But they didn't return as before— they thickened, tempered like forged metal. His muscles regrew in layers, denser, stronger, coiled with raw potential.
His skin, once soft and scarred, was replaced by a smooth, jade-hued resilience — tougher than tempered iron yet as supple as silk. His fingernails blackened and curved slightly — claws, sharpened by instinct. His hair grew wild, falling down his back in a tangled mane streaked with crimson.
Even his spiritual veins — the broken channels of his meridians — were reforged anew, like molten glass set in perfect lines. They glowed faintly with a crimson hue.
A beast-like strength now slept beneath his skin. Not rage. Not fury. But raw, terrifying control.
Ren Tai was no longer human alone. He had become the Cauldron-HeartBeast, forged from silence and flame.
And when it was done — when the fire cooled — his soul sat still, strong, silent.
The Screaming Abyss still howled.
But the screams no longer touched him.
They circled his new presence like frightened ghosts, unable to pierce the fortress that was now his being. Where before the Abyss had eaten at his sanity, now it recoiled in quiet dread.
He opened his eyes.
They were no longer gray.
They burned — deep crimson, like coals left in the hearth of some ancient god.
He stood. Slowly. Powerfully.
And then — It happened.
An explosion detonated in his mind.
Not of pain. Not of chaos. But memory.
Memories that didn't belong to this lifetime surged back into him with the force of a thousand storms. Techniques, knowledge, names, battles, betrayals — all of it, cascading into his mind like a tidal wave breaking through a dam.
He saw himself, robed in flame-colored silks, standing above legions. Refining pills with a flick of the hand. Forging blades that whispered to the heavens. Drawing formations in the air that bent gravity. Speaking talismans that made kings kneel.
He remembered the day he had first found the Crimson Cauldron. The ruin. The blood ritual. The day it vanished — no, merged with him.
He remembered growing old — feared, respected, envied. Yet unfulfilled. Dying on the edge of divinity, never crossing it.
And now —
He was back.
Ren Tai. Once a forgotten servant. Now a man reborn in soul, in body, in memory.
He was no longer a shadow.
He was no longer the boy swept away by fate — he was the coming storm, and fate would kneel.