Red was the color of massacre and butchery. It was a sea of broken bodies piled high in the streets of a ruined city. It was coagulating blood in the staring eyes of corpses, the flowers that bloomed from flesh.

Squelch. Crack.

Flesh and meat tore. Ribs and sternum gave. Blood stained his hands crimson. His hand plunged into the cavity, unmindful of the stinking air released. The meat beneath him twitched in its death throes, gold and jewels slick with blood and offal. A king, a priest, or a warrior. It did not matter. It was merely meat.

It amazed him, looking back, at how much he still did not understand when he began his rebellion. He had grasped the first truth of War, that all who could not be kin were enemies eventually. This, he understood, and this, he had brought to those like him, the scaleless lords of the Lakes, under the guise of touring the province to gain further support for the western expedition.

The worms were lazy. That was the true sting of it. They were cruel lords who dreamed their dominion was a law as firm as that of any ascended spirit, and perhaps, for the Bai, it was. There was not even consideration for what he would do. It was madness after all.

He spent stones like water because what did money mean to a dead man? When the cadres of the clans left for the Western Expedition, they brought with them the transportation circles of a hundred, hundred masters, their sister circles left in the compounds of the scaleless clans.

It was so much simpler when they only needed to be used once.

Veins and arteries snapped like cord as his fist closed around the still beating heart and wrenched it free with a wet rip. In it burned a blazing star of power, the seed and soul of a dead man’s enlightenment.

The march to Rammadh had been brutal beyond words. He lost count of the dead within days, and their corpses carpeted the way. There had been no time for burials or rites, not for friends and certainly, not for foes. The scavenging began with weapons, replacing the broken, the cannibalization of what should have been grave goods, and of consumption of the dead’s qi to fuel the march of the living.

They could not slow down, a safe location had to be secured before the Bai could come for those they had left behind.

He had known since he was a boy that war was a sacrifice. He had known that a warleader was a reaper of men, choosing who would live and die. For acknowledging this truth, he was called the Butcher.

How absurd for the children of Yao the Fisher, he who became Death, and the children of Grandmother Serpent, whom even that supreme killer had knelt to in love, to say such words. In the first weeks of the campaign, he came to wonder if this was a part of great Yao’s truth.

Men were meat, and nothing more. Nothing that lived could not also die. War was slaughter and massacre, and all which sought to obscure that were preening charlatans. In the end, the most profound truths are the most simple ones, the truths that seemed insultingly obvious until one stared long enough into their depths.

He brought the lump of bloody flesh to his mouth and bit down, inhaling the scent of copper and the strands of a dead man’s power.

To live was a victory. So long as the foe was dead, and he lived, his people and his family could pile all the little bricks and pretty lies of civilization atop the mountain of the dead.

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Family was Everything. Life was War, and War was Sacrifice. Everything for Family.

The people, his people, the ones who followed him, were all his kin. They would live, even if the world was forced to break first. He would sacrifice anything and everything to see that outcome.

They had broken the line of demon warriors which defended Rammadh and found a city of people, little different from the mortals and low cultivators of Zhengjian. They had slaughtered them one and all, men and women, elders and children, until the gutters clogged with blood and the flocking crows turned the sky to black.

The enemy died. His family lived.

And on top of a temple similar to where he was now, his armor in tatters, his flesh bruised and broken, and his very bones on the verge of collapse from his war with the Priest King of Rammadh, he had heard it for the first time. It rumbled in the screaming of crows and the buzzing of flies.

Lub-Dub.

The beat of an unimaginably vast heart pounded in his veins, pounded in his mind.

Lub-Dub.

The truth of life opened in his eyes. He saw an endless crimson vista, the eternal war of all against all, every living thing in endless competition, devouring and being devoured. He had stared into eyes that were oceans of blood, every drop ever spilled in this gods-forsaken world.

He cracked open the priest king’s skull with his bare hands, tore out his sovereign chakra, and devoured it.

His ascension had turned the sky crimson for twelve days and eleven nights.

He took a second bite of weakly beating flesh, chewed, and spit, leaving a smear of offal across the broken stones.

Lub-Dub.

He could hear her heartbeat again. The Goddess of Life, the Great Spirit of Bloody Evolution, Lady of the Sunflower Fields. Born from war and a dragon's unwanted seed. The great and terrible irony. Trueborn daughter of the Sage Qin, First Emperor, the mightiest of his heirs, when, by his own words, only power could measure worthiness and give choice? Heir to the truth of the Empire.

He drew in a hissing breath and pushed her heartbeat from his mind. The great truth he had seen was more than the Goddess of the Red Jungle, just as a single phase was not the moon entire. He would not submit. He would carve his own truth into the Sovereignty of Conflict.

“Take my hand, O Carrion King. You have but to reach out.”

“Dragon’s blood offered freely,” he croaked through bloody and cracked lips. A raindrop fell upon his hand, and flesh burned, turning red then black, flesh rotting in moments. “That was the deal, and they are here.”

The serpents had come.

The black rain fell, and the stone sagged and melted, trackless leagues of jungle withered and screamed and died. Overhead, there was an ocean of poison consuming the sky, its pressure immense, greater than the deepest depths of the sea.

The black rain fell, and Sun Shao stood. His armor rusted and pitted, and his flesh blackened. A chunk of his hair sloughed off, landing wetly on melting stones. He looked up, and his eyes boiled in their sockets.

A red spear clattered to the ground, no longer held by nerveless fingers. The pitiful puppet of flesh and blood that had once been him, the body of his birth, turned to rot and mush.

The corpse city shuddered, and the earth groaned and heaved.

One thousand blades erupted from the earth, the manifest killing intent of countless allies and enemies alike, and they met one million raindrops and scattered them. Armored in corpses, tar, and a shattered city, Sun Shao rose. His ten burning crowns incinerated the ocean of venom and scraped the sky. Their lurid light revealed the warband of titanic serpents and white-clad warriors who stood above the clouds.

Even now, those eyes looked down upon him.

From ten maws running with rivers of blood, Sun Shao screamed his challenge to the heavens.

And at his feet, countless sunflowers, watered in blood, bloomed.