Jin's mind had sunk in a secluded place within his soul. It was an empty place, colorless, where his voice echoed a dozen times before fading away. The boy yelled for help. Driven by the agony that blinded his heart, the boy was nothing more than a useful object to the independent desires of his own chi. Unable to cope with what was happening outside, he sat on the transparent crystal floor and placed himself in a fetal position, covering his eyes with both hands, as if he did not want to be seen crying, for he was ashamed to be seen as weak.

He hadn't helped at all; he hadn't even run away. Bardolph's harsh voice was still ringing in his ears. Their deaths had been in vain. He couldn't forgive himself for how useless he had been.

It was time to retaliate, to show that he had paid attention to the old man's rare teachings. No longer would he be a victim of his own destiny. It was time to take charge of his own body.

The tears stopped and he wiped the rest of his face. His cheeks were pink, and his lips were humid. He got up and shouted loud enough to raise all the corpses in the village. As they stood up, the crystal under his feet also broke into hundreds of shrapnel. Jin plunged into darkness, this time with bloody eyes and clenched fists, awakening in his body.

He looked around, trying to understand what was happening and how everything had developed up to that very moment.

The peasants' decayed bodies flung themselves at the soldiers, tearing their clothes and ripping off their body limbs before biting their faces or sticking small knives and hooks in their bodies. There was no precision or even a meaning, it was all just dementia at its peak. The screams were loud—crazy. The soldiers begged for forgiveness while their bodies vanished among the crowd of zombies who consumed and defiled them.

Jin had no idea what was happening. His hands were wrapped in black goo and the landscape was bleached in black and white. The pain had been appeased and now there remained only a peaceful desire to end everything, leaving none of the soldiers alive.

The boy tried to step forward, but the body didn't obey him. A secondary voice, more acute than his, scrambled with his consciousness, instructing him to watch the bloody developments within meters of him.

"See, this is your true power," a female voice said, echoing in the young man's mind, and stretching to his ears.

The boy didn't answer. He didn't even know what to say. After all, he had no control over his chi. He didn't even know he had chi inside him until a few minutes ago.

Unlike the other energies and mana that ruled the four corners of the mortal kingdom, the black mana had a life of its own. It spread throughout the meridians of the bodies it enslaved and fed on their essence, sucking their chi until there was no more than an empty casing left.

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Jin's tongue tasted like rusty metal. He fell to his knees. His body couldn't withstand the pressure of power itself. Black lines spread through his veins; beginning in his hands and going up to his neck.

They acted as chains, fastening him to the floor, preventing him from even closing his fist or screaming without feeling metal slithering down his throat.

In the distance, the undead had almost finished. The soldiers' bodies lay on the ground unrecognizable. The torn and bruised skin as if they were mere plastic that had been slashed. The blood clotted over the surface of the teeth and nail marks and slid to the floor and into the clothes, staining everything along the way. The sour smell of blood mixed with the sweat of bodies and armor gave rise to a rotten odor—even worse than outdated eggs or even the smell of decadent zombies, their bodies gradually falling apart. The color of their skin turned gray; fragments of their flesh loosening from the body.

Their eyes were now two balls, the skin around was liquefied and swallowing the rest of the face. The black chi they were feeding on was running out. The environment no longer had mana to offer them.

Color was a thing of the past. A cloudy shroud still lingered around the city. The boy was nothing more than a puppet at the hands of a power he didn't even know he had.

Luminous flames rose near the wooden house where Jin had lived his whole life. Only the commander was still standing, his hand already quivering and sweat dripping from his forehead to his fingers. He slashed the approaching, limping, undeads, already with wrinkles around their cracked lips. All the zombies who could still walk marched toward him, roaring incomprehensible monosyllables, their eyes uncolored and lifeless.

"Kaji School surrenders to no one!" he shouted, stepping forward and maneuvering his sword brilliantly.

Heads rolled across the floor, arms and legs adorning it. But no matter how good he was, he was no match for the dozens of zombies who knocked themselves down to get a piece of him.

It didn't take long before he was drowned among the crowd, the flame dazzled, and the body torn apart. Jin watched everything. He had never seen a scene so bloody, so painful. He had long accepted the fact that he had been abandoned, but this was a totally different feeling. This time, his family had been taken away. The pity he used to feel for his parents, for having been forced to abandon his own son, as Bardolph told him, was nothing compared to the mixture of anger and sadness that still plagued the portion of his soul that was apathy-free.

"Stop!" Jin finally spoke, the voice like a whisper in the night.

The zombies stopped and looked back at him. The chi that floated around his hands traveled across the air, reaching the bodies and sucking the semblance of Jin's soul that each of them possessed. One by one, like towers that knock down the next when they fell, the bodies landed on the ground. Little by little, the crystalline sky reappeared here and there.

An unknown force ravaged Jin's body once again. His heavy eyes gradually closed. The boy still tried to get up, but he didn't have the strength. He had gone beyond what a seventeen-year-old's body could bear. All the joints were aching and his head begged for a break.

Jin closed his eyes and his body collapsed on the ground, the surrounding leaves hovering in the air before fluttering down again.

The sun shone, brightening the blood on the soldiers' armor and on the autumn’s yellow leaves.