The deeper Nerin descended into Blackgate's heart, the more the world unraveled like frayed sinew. The air thickened—not with dust or decay, but with memories leaking from the walls like black bile, sticky and corrosive. Each breath tasted like the screams of a thousand forgotten kings, rulers who had worn crowns forged in lies and drowned in their own ambition.
Chains pulsed rhythmically, a grotesque heartbeat that echoed through the bone corridors, syncing with Nerin's ragged breath and thrumming pulse. The Mark burned hotter now—no longer a cold ember but a roaring blaze consuming his veins, clawing toward his mind.
Ahead, the corridors split into three winding tunnels. Each twisted in impossible geometry, defying reason and swallowing sound. The gates above them bore sigils cracked and bleeding:
The Tunnel of Ashen Thrones
The Passage of Silent Kings
The Descent of Shattered Crowns
Nerin's mind reeled. Every step he took echoed a whispered curse—names of monarchs who betrayed themselves and fell into oblivion. Their stories bled through the stone: treachery, madness, sacrifice, and the cruel calculus of power.
The voice—the cruel system's breath—returned, cold and unyielding:
[PATH CHOICE REQUIRED][WARNING: CHOICE WILL ALTER MIND AND SOUL IRREVOCABLY][1. Ashen Thrones: Claim the throne, bear the weight of lost kingdoms.][2. Silent Kings: Embrace the void, forsake your voice to hear the unheard.][3. Shattered Crowns: Break the cycle, shatter your past to forge a new path.]
The cold fire of the Mark flared. Nerin felt the pull—the hunger to ascend, to silence, or to fracture. His thoughts raced like shattered glass.
Power demands sacrifice.Silence devours truth.Destruction births creation.
His fingers trembled, the bone knife digging into his palm, drawing blood that sizzled as it met the shadows pooling at his feet.
Then, without hesitation, he chose.
The Descent of Shattered Crowns.
The tunnel swallowed him whole. The walls bled whispers, each syllable a shard of broken dreams and failed revolutions. As he walked, the air thickened with the scent of rust and ash—remnants of crowns shattered by betrayal and fire.
Nerin's footsteps echoed in a chamber vast and hollow, its ceiling lost to darkness. Bones of forgotten monarchs formed thrones—twisted and grotesque, dripping with memories that seethed and writhed like living things.
From the shadows stepped a figure crowned in shattered glass, eyes glowing with cold fire. It was both king and ruin, beauty and decay—an echo of what Nerin could become.
"You seek to break the cycle," the figure intoned, voice a grinding thunder. "But to shatter is to bleed. To bleed is to be hollowed."
Nerin felt the Mark's hunger flare violently. His body screamed, memories not his own flooding his mind—visions of betrayals, wars lost, and promises broken.
"You must pay the price," the figure continued. "Not with steel or blood, but with self. Every piece you break, every crown you shatter, feeds the hunger inside."
Nerin's bones ached. The bone knife pulsed with new power—no longer just a weapon but a key to unraveling himself.
He raised the blade, whispering the vow that would bind his soul:
I will shatter to remake. I will bleed to bind. The Hollow Mark is mine.
The throne shattered into a thousand black shards, swirling into a storm of darkness that wrapped around him.
When the storm cleared, Nerin stood taller, the Mark blazing with renewed ferocity.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: ASPECT EVOLVED][Trait Upgraded: Hollow Resolve → Hollow Rebirth][New Ability Unlocked: Crownbreaker's Oath]
The corridors shifted again, folding into paths unknown. The next trial awaited—more cruel, more merciless.
But Nerin no longer feared the hunger.
He was the hunger now.
The air inside Blackgate had changed. It was no longer thick with whispered curses or memories clawing from the walls—it had become a vacuum, an oppressive silence that sucked away the very essence of sound and thought. Nerin's footsteps vanished beneath him, swallowed whole by the void that stretched like a wound across the bone floor.
His breath came shallow and brittle, each inhale a fight against the suffocating emptiness. The Mark on his palm throbbed with savage urgency—no longer just a brand but a living parasite feasting on his resolve.
Ahead, the corridor fragmented into a shattered labyrinth, twisting and folding in impossible angles. The very geometry mocked sanity, each turn folding back on itself like a serpent devouring its own tail. The walls were etched with sigils bleeding shadow, glowing faintly like dying stars.
A voice slithered into his mind, cold and hollow:
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: TRIAL FIVE — ECHOES IN THE VOID][OBJECTIVE: Navigate the Labyrinth of Lost Souls. Confront your ultimate fear.]
Nerin's eyes darted, catching fleeting reflections in the cracks—visions of himself, fractured and broken in infinite permutations. Each echo whispered a truth he dared not face, a lie he clung to like a drowning man clutching driftwood.
The silence shattered with a scream—a sound ripped from the deepest abysses of despair. Shadows spilled from the walls, coalescing into a figure wrapped in tattered veils of night. It bore his face, but twisted in agony, eyes bleeding stars that swallowed all light.
"You carry the Hollow Mark, yet you do not understand its hunger," it hissed, voice fracturing reality itself. "What will you sacrifice when all that's left is the void inside?"
Nerin's grip tightened on the bone knife, the cold steel an anchor against the swirling madness.
"I will become the hunger," he growled. "I will feed on the void until it feeds me."
The echo laughed—a sound like shattered glass grinding on bone—and lunged.
Steel clashed with shadow, light with darkness. The labyrinth warped with every strike, corridors stretching and contracting in impossible rhythms. Pain bloomed like poisonous flowers in Nerin's flesh, memories unspooling and twisting like broken threads.
But through the agony, something deep inside him stirred—a fierce, unyielding spark. The Mark flared, burning away the echoes like a cleansing fire.
With a final, desperate strike, Nerin shattered the echo into shards of night.
Silence reclaimed the labyrinth.
The void whispered no more.
Nerin stood alone.
Stronger.
Hollow.
Reborn.
The path ahead cracked open—a jagged wound in the darkness revealing a throne carved from nightmare and ash.
He was no longer just the echo of the forgotten.
He was the architect of their doom.