Blood Of Destruction

Hope Shattered

A crack in space tore open, and a thirteen-year-old boy was thrown out. He was so badly injured that he could barely hold himself upright. 

Both arms were scraped raw, the flesh hanging as if it might fall from the bone. He could not take another step; trembling, he dropped to his knees. But something was terribly wrong despite the wounds, not a single drop of blood flowed from his body. It was as if someone had drained him completely.

His name was David. His mother, Matilda, was a powerful universe lord, and within his family he had once been called a genius. Yet his mother never cared for him, treating him as something untouchable, something not worth her time. 

Still, David hoped desperately to be recognized by her. From an early age he did everything he could. He pushed himself to become a warrior, believing that his efforts might finally catch her eye. When he broke through to the Star Realm, a small hope flared in his heart.

A few years ago, his mother had come to the ancestral house where he had lived all his life. David saw her from a distance. Just before she left, she paused as if something had crossed her mind, and she handed him a token. 

He had thought it might protect him in danger, a silent message that she cared, after all.

“Take it,” she had said, her voice cool but not unkind. “Keep it with you. I won’t be back for a long time.”

David’s hands had trembled as he held the token. “Mother… Does this mean you will think of me?”

She did not answer. She only looked at him with unreadable eyes, then turned and stepped through the portal. But David had clutched that token to his chest, a tiny flame of hope burning in his loneliness.

That hope was shattered during the hunting game. He had joined as he did every year, killing monsters to exchange for cultivation resources. Without it, he would get nothing for the whole year. 

At first everything seemed normal, but then a group of men surrounded him. They were far stronger. They grabbed him, crushed his hands, and clamped a blood-transmitting machine onto his body. 

As his blood was pulled out, David screamed for help, but nobody came. In desperation, he took out his mother’s token, the one thing he believed would save him. Yet nothing happened. No shield, no attack, no protective measure at all. It was just an empty object.

Before he could even process the betrayal, two of the men stomped on his arms. A sickening crack echoed through the air. David’s cry was raw and broken. The four attackers were ready to kill him then, but suddenly a space crack appeared, startling them. 

Seizing the moment, David crawled toward the crack. His shattered fingers still gripped the token that had once brought him so much joy  but now it only reflected a dark reality. With the last of his strength and the greatest pain he had ever felt, he threw it away and let go of all hope in what family meant.

As he fell into the crack, he heard one of the men scoff, “What a joke he actually thought the lady would protect him.”

David landed in a strange place. He dropped to his knees, gasping, and only then noticed the huge monster lying nearby. At first he thought it was asleep, but when he looked closer, blood was still flowing from its massive head.

 The monster was dead, a body as big as a mountain, so vast his eyes could not take it all in at once.

 It was as if the heavens themselves were against him: he had escaped one death only to be thrown into another nightmare. He had no energy left to run. Even if he did, how fast could he go?

But some unknown courage made him stand. Step by painful step, he stumbled toward the monster’s head. There he found a great pond of blood, dark and glimmering, spread on the ground like a lake. As he reached the edge, his consciousness began to blur. He could not hold on any longer and fell face-first into the blood.

The moment his body sank, David felt as if he had entered an eternal peace. It felt like the final moment of his life.

Inside his mind, he dreamed. In the dream his mother brought his little sister to meet him for the first time, and even his father whom he had never known came home.

 They were all together, laughing, and David felt a warmth he had never known. A tear slid down his dream-self’s cheek.

 “Is this what it feels like to be loved?” he whispered, and in the dream his mother smiled and stroked his hair.

But while David lay in that gentle dream, his real body was locked in a brutal fight for survival. The blood in that pond could kill even the giant monster, a creature from the Universe Master realm. 

A thirteen-year-old boy’s body should never have been able to withstand it. The blood began to erode David’s flesh, but then something astonishing happened. From deep inside his bones, a green liquid seeped out, repairing every part of his body again and again.

 At the same time, a darkness that could erode everything began to flow from him  a darkness that held the nature of life itself, like some profound law that could destroy everything and yet also save everything.

 The pond of blood, once larger than a football field, shrank bit by bit around David’s body. The visible darkness expanded, and even the monster’s corpse began to decompose, as though the darkness was devouring it entirely.

At that moment, far away in the Human Association headquarters, a woman was sitting with a six-year-old girl, teaching her something. The girl was laughing. 

Then the woman’s expression suddenly changed. She had sensed the token she had given to David. Just as she was about to take action, a voice transmission stopped her.

That woman was none other than David’s mother, Matilda, a powerful universe master who held a prominent position among the human race. The girl, Carla, was her daughter, the one she was training as her heir.

“Don’t interfere in junior matters,” the voice said. “They won’t actually harm him.”

Right after that message, a sudden, terrible intuition stabbed through Matilda’s blood. Her son, the child she had never cared about, was about to die.

Ignoring the advice, she tore space apart and arrived at the hunting grounds in an instant.

There she saw four men holding a tube filled with blood, her son’s blood. The token she had given David lay discarded on the ground like worthless junk. Fury rose in her chest, but she reined it in. First, she needed to know what had happened.

Using time reverse, she viewed the past. She watched David get surrounded, dragged, and beaten to a wretched state. She heard his hand bones crack, saw the machine drain his blood while he sobbed for help that never came. 

She saw his trembling fingers pull out the token, saw hope flicker in his eyes, and then saw that hope die when nothing happened. Two men stepped on his arms and the sound of breaking bones made Matilda’s heart clench. 

When the four were about to finish him, the space crack appeared, and David crawled toward it. Then he paused and looked back at the token still hooked in his broken fingers. The expression on his face in that moment was not just pain, it was the total silence, quiet death of hope. With a ragged cry, he threw the token away and disappeared into the crack.

Watching the scene, Matilda’s body shook. She could feel her son’s heart breaking, and she understood with unbearable clarity that she was the one who had broken it. 

Through the whole ordeal, David had wept in fear and agony, but the deepest desolation appeared only when his mother’s token proved empty.

Matilda turned toward the four men. She didn’t give them a chance to speak. She searched their memories directly, and learned everything: her own family members had sent them. Because she didn’t love David, they assumed his presence kept her from visiting the ancestral home. They thought that draining David’s blood and discarding him from the family would bring her back more often.

Even the idea to drain the blood and pass the universe master’s bloodline gene into another body  and to kill David had come from one of the elders. That same elder was the one who had told her not to interfere.

Without blinking, Matilda killed the four men. Her rage was about to consume everything around her when an old man suddenly appeared. 

He spoke to her quietly, and whatever he said was enough to make her restrain her fury  for now. She tried to calculate David’s position, but something blocked her, and she could only leave with a storm in her heart.

As she vanished, she did not notice a pair of eyes watching everything unfold, eyes that disappeared like they never existed.

Meanwhile, David began to stir inside the blood pond. The pain returned to his body, but at the same time the great pond, once bigger than a football field, had shrunk into a tight sphere around him. He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious. As awareness slowly returned, he realized his body had completely healed. And his cultivation, which had been at the third level of the Star Realm, had now broken through to the ninth level of the universe realm.

“I’m… not dead?” he whispered hoarsely, staring at his hands. “My body was destroyed… There is no blood left. What happened?”

The huge monster he had seen before was gone, not even bones remained, as if devoured by something. Fear spiked through him. He scanned his surroundings. The place looked like a ruined planet, the soil stained a dark red as if drenched in blood, with wreckage of spaceships scattered here and there.

Trembling but driven by a fragile hope of finding answers, David moved toward one of the wreckages.

Suddenly, a voice echoed out of nowhere.

“Successor.”

David froze. His heart pounded, and for a long moment he didn’t dare move or breathe. He had been abandoned, drained, and shattered, but this single word held a weight he couldn’t yet understand. A strange mixture of fear and desperate longing bloomed inside him, and he looked around, his voice cracking.

“Who… who said that?”