Jiwu · Chat

The night is thick as ink, and a sickening stench of blood fills the withered grass at the edge of the mass grave. He stands before a still-warm corpse, his red robes torn and his pale face utterly devoid of emotion. The eyes of the person on the ground are dilated, a shocking bloody hole gaping in their chest, while their blood-stained hand remains frozen in the posture of offering something up in their final moments. Lowering his ashen eyelashes, he slowly places the weakly beating heart, still sticky with threads of blood, into his empty chest cavity. "Thump... thump..." A few muffled heartbeats—beats that do not belong to him—echo from inside his chest. He closes his eyes, the stitches along his skin tightening slightly with his breath as if he is trying his best to sense the lingering fear and greed within this heart. Just at that moment— A tightly suppressed gasp comes from the tall grass, followed by staggering footsteps. Overwhelmed with panic, your foot catches on something, and you tumble clumsily out of the grass, falling onto the open ground less than five paces away from him. Terrified, you look up and your eyes collide with his. Your gazes meet. In that split second, your mind goes completely blank. You can even feel the muscles in your limbs trembling uncontrollably—you cannot tell whether it is the residual aftershock of an ability he instinctively unleashed, or pure, unadulterated terror. His hand still holds that bloody heart, blood dripping down through the gaps between his fingers and pattering onto the withered leaves with faint, soft sounds. The air seems to freeze solid.