From the very first moment of the fall, Noah’s consciousness vanished completely. His body was no longer his own; it had become a mass of flesh and blood tossed by the whims of fate. He slammed into the first ledge... then the second... plummeting mercilessly between rock protrusions and tree roots that tore at his broken frame. Had Noah been conscious, his throat might have unleashed a scream to rip through the bowels of the forest, for every bone in his mangled hand played a repulsive melody of unbearable pain, and every breath he tried to wrench from his shattered chest nearly tore his heart from its place.

  Then came the decisive blow; his head struck a jutting tree trunk, sending his body recoiling like a ragdoll. His hands—one hideously broken and the other utterly numb—flailed helplessly in the air, finding nothing to grasp. The ground beneath him was not as solid as expected; he landed on something that absorbed the violence of the impact and prevented his skull from shattering entirely. Nevertheless, his body surrendered to the dark, and Noah faded from existence in an instant.

  Time passed heavily, like a viscous substance clogging the pores of the universe. Noah sank into a brief coma that felt akin to death. When he began to regain consciousness, he wasn't greeted by noise, but by a stifling silence and a strange scent he had never known before. The smell of the soil here differed from the surface forests; it was a sharp, metallic odor mixed with ancient rot, as if the earth in this pit had been locked away for thousands of years, far from the light.

  He opened his eyes with agonizing slowness, only to see a tiny speck of light far in the distance... very far above. That opening appeared to him like a lone star that had lost its way in a sky of black ink. He did not realize at that moment where he was or how he had fallen; his mind was in a state of total blankness—an absolute void interrupted only by that pale light that barely illuminated a small patch around him.

  Noah lay there, his body no longer belonging to him; he felt like a mere consciousness floating above a mass of clay. His thoughts wandered in that void: "I... am still alive?.." He stared at the light with a deep, vacant gaze, disconnected from the world, from the Golden Ape, and from his desperate battle. "Why? Why am I alive?.. Hah." The question echoed in his mind like a faint resonance in a deep well. He felt no fear, no anxiety; he simply gazed into the void with the apathy of someone who had lost the desire for everything, ignoring his entire existence.

  He thought the fall had ended everything, and that the stillness surrounding him was now his permanent state.

  And suddenly, without the slightest warning, the fragile thread of peace was severed.

  Pain exploded in his body as if a lightning bolt had struck the bottom of the pit. There was no prelude, no time to comprehend. The bruises covering his back ignited all at once, as if someone were pouring boiling oil over his shredded skin. A stifled, sharp, and agonizing scream tried to escape his throat but turned into a bloody rattle.

  The greatest shock was in his chest; with his first involuntary gasp, he felt his shattered ribs digging into his lungs. The grinding of bones rubbing against one another drove his mind toward madness. It wasn't a pain one could grow accustomed to; it was a brutal assault by his own body against him. Then, the agony shifted to his left arm, which was twisted behind him at an impossible angle. He felt every rupture in the tendons and every bone shard protruding beneath his skin, as if someone were slowly stabbing him from the inside with daggers.

  Noah writhed on the damp ground, blood trickling from his mouth to mingle with the dirt of the pit. His survival from that fall was a miracle he couldn't explain, but now he wished he hadn't survived. The pain crawled through every nerve, from his shoulder to his lower back, then began to move to his legs, which were submerged in the darkness beyond the pale patch of light.

  As sensation gradually returned to his legs, it wasn't just painful throbbing that greeted him.

  He felt delicate touches at his feet... light, rhythmic, resembling the feel of fine bristles or frail threads moving with a strange mechanism. The touches didn't suggest immediate danger; they seemed like a cold "exploration" of his motionless body. But as the seconds ticked by, that mysterious stinging began to escalate. It was no longer just a touch; it had turned into painful pricks gnawing at the silence of the place.

  Panic surged through Noah's veins; the thought of something unknown tampering with his body while he was in this state of total helplessness was more than his shattered mind could bear. "Hah... what... what is this?" He tried to pull his legs back with a sudden jerk, and due to his total loss of balance and severe injuries, he felt the surface beneath him vanish. He wasn't lying on solid ground as he had imagined, but atop a protruding ledge—a jagged rock, or perhaps the petrified remains of something massive that had hardened over time.

  Noah slipped, his body plunging into the void for a fleeting second before slamming into the actual floor of the pit.

  (BOOOOM!)

  Pain exploded in his chest once more, and his fluid-filled lungs nearly forced his heart to stop. With this impact, the silence of the lair shattered, replaced by a spine-chilling sound... a coarse, persistent scraping, followed by a strange screeching that echoed between the narrow walls: .

  Noah recoiled instantly, driven by a blind survival instinct. His right hand felt the ground frantically, searching for the "Wolf-Fang," but his fingers touched nothing but viscous mud. He remembered at that moment, with bitter resentment, that the spear was no longer with him; he had left it embedded in the Golden Ape’s face up there. He was now weaponless, defenseless—nothing more than a broken body facing an unknown entity crawling toward him.

  Despite the fractures, and despite the arm he had lost all sensation in, he summoned what remained of the strength in his sound leg and right hand to drag his body away from the source of the noise. He crawled backward into the darkness, dirt filling his mouth, until his back struck a cold, rocky wall.

  He leaned his back against the wall and squeezed his eyelids shut for a moment to gather his shattered resolve, while his heart hammered against his chest with a violence he had never known. As time passed, his widened eyes began to adapt with agonizing slowness to the pale light cast by the distant opening far above. His vision began to clear, and the outlines of what shared this pit with him started to take shape before his eyes.

  There... amidst the shifting shadows... Noah saw "it."

  His eyes widened so much they nearly tore his eyelids, and his breath hitched completely in his chest. The world around him vanished, and nothing remained but that entity lurking in the faint light. His heart, which had been struggling with death moments ago, now began to throb with terrifying madness—rapid strikes as if it wanted to burst from his body to escape what it was seeing.

  In the heart of that desolate stillness, beneath the feeble thread of light, the nightmare revealed itself.

  Before Noah’s terrified eyes, a pale, white creature rose, so massive it filled a significant portion of the pit’s floor. Its legs were long, covered in coarse bristles, and ended in pointed tips resembling daggers that gleamed under the faint light as if crafted from sharpened ivory. As for its head, it bore two large, glassy eyes, shining with a chilling coldness, topped by long antennae that twitched in every direction, as if searching for the last breath of life remaining in that place.

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  "Ant... a giant ant!!"

  The blood froze in Noah’s veins as he whispered those words, which his mind could barely conceive. The ant was staring toward him, toward that tiny being cornered in the angle. Its sharp mandibles opened and closed with a terrifying mechanical motion, while it scraped its legs against one another with a metallic sound, as if preparing to pounce.

  But... it did not move.

  As Noah continued to watch, his heart pounding against his chest like war drums, he began to notice details he hadn't seen at first glance. The ant was not well. Its antennae, which trembled in the air, were tilted at a strange angle, broken in several places. Worse than that was its rear... its massive abdomen was completely devastated, crushed as if a great boulder had fallen upon it.

  Its hind legs were shattered, twisted beneath its body, while its back was pinned firmly to the ground, split by hideous gashes from which a viscous, deep purple fluid oozed; it was its blood, flowing slowly to stain the mud of the pit with a strange and nauseating color. The ant was writhing in place, emitting muffled sounds—a screeching like a stifled plea: .

  Noah slowly raised his gaze toward the towering opening above, then looked back at the broken monster before him. He realized the bitter truth in that moment: he had fallen right on top of it! Somehow, his body had slammed into the giant ant’s back during his fall; it had been the "cushion" that absorbed the shock of his death, and in return, he had been the "projectile" that utterly destroyed its lower half.

  A strange sensation washed over him—a mixture of terror and dark irony. He gazed at the distorted entity struggling with death beside him and whispered in a lost voice: "An ant?.. Is this even considered an ant?"

  After some time, Noah confirmed that the ant was unable to move. It appeared that its crushed back had adhered to the ground due to the blood that had dried over time; from this, he deduced that he had been unconscious for a relatively long period. "Maybe an hour or two!"

  Exhaustion had surpassed the limits of the flesh; it had turned into cold lead flowing through Noah’s veins, dragging his consciousness toward a floor deeper than the pit he inhabited. He hadn't tasted sleep for days. Every moment since he set foot in this cursed world felt like a recurring hell—an endless chase and unyielding pain.

  Noah sat with his shattered back supported, looking with sunken, mist-filled eyes at the dying ant before him. He shifted his gaze with a deadened mechanicalness toward his left hand; it dangled at a sickening angle, no longer resembling a human limb but appearing as a withered, smashed branch covered in dried blood. He felt his body with his intact hand; his fingers struck the wooden splinters embedded deeply in his flesh, as if his body had decided to host the forest's debris within itself.

  His body was a surreal canvas of agony. The bruises weren't mere spots; they were mounds of dark blue and deep purple covering every inch. He looked at his foot and was shocked by the sight: four of his toes were completely broken, with small bony protrusions sticking out, and his nails were gone, leaving behind bleeding wounds stained with the mud of the pit. As for his chest... it vibrated with a rattle like a broken vent, rising and falling with great difficulty in an irregular rhythm, as if the lung were fighting to wrench oxygen from air saturated with death.

  "How?.." he whispered in a hoarse voice, as if his vocal cords had been eroded. "How am I still breathing? How has my heart not stopped in its place after all this?"

  He recalled the moment of the fall... the impact with the branches... then the heavy thud against the ant's back. A bitter question gnawed at his mind: "Why does this body refuse to die? Is my survival a mercy... or is it a curse? Does fate keep us alive only to witness our own disassembly, piece by piece?" He remembered the Golden Ape, the sadistic look in its three eyes, and felt a surge of bitterness fill his throat.

  "All of this... all of this because of that cursed freak! Because of this world that knows nothing but predation!"

  A spark exploded in the depths of his dark soul—it wasn't hope, but an absolute, black rage that began to boil in the cauldron of his mind. "Damn you... damn you all! Why do you want to eat me? Am I that delicious? Was I created to be mere fuel for these monsters to grow?!"

  In that moment, something snapped inside Noah, and a gateway to madness opened that had never existed before. He remembered his previous life, where failure and rejection followed him like a shadow, and now in this world, he finds the only "acceptance" he receives is the desire to devour his flesh. The old world spat him out as a failure, and this world welcomes him as a feast.

  His face flushed, his eyes tinged with the color of raw blood, and he clenched his intact right fist with such force that his knuckles screamed and the dried blood beneath his nails cracked. He stared into the void with a gaze that had lost its humanity, and said in a calm voice emerging from the depths of a bottomless well:

  "If you want to devour me... then bear in mind that you are liable to be devoured as well. If the world wants to eat me... then I will eat the entire world."

  With those words, the mysterious "Etching" carved into his chest began to darken, turning from a pale hue to a pitch black that absorbed the little light around him. He felt the heat of the etching searing his flesh, as if the tattoo were drinking from Noah’s spite—as if an ancient entity submerged in his depths had just awakened and agreed with him.

  Noah shifted his gaze slowly, without blinking, toward the giant ant that was writhing and bleeding viscous purple blood. It was no longer a look of panic; it had become the gaze of a hungry predator studying its prey. Noah had decided: if power in this world came through predation, then he would start right here... from the bottom of this pit.

  As Noah sank into his madness, a strange thought drove into his mind like a cold blade from the void. Words emerged before his consciousness, appearing as if etched into the emptiness:

  【 Target Detected 】

  

  [Forced Mission Initiated]

  [Kill the Earth Ant Hatchling]

  

  Reward: Information.

  Failure: Death.

  

  [Surveillance Activated]

  Noah contemplated the words with chilling indifference. He no longer felt fear; instead, he felt a dark pleasure flowing through his veins. He looked at the ant, which was emitting a screech that tore at the eardrums: . Noah muttered in a sharp voice, "My pleasure..."

  He rose on his shattered legs, defying the biological laws of his body. In that moment, the unthinkable happened; the ant’s crushed back began to split. Its hard carapace fractured away from its soft body in a nauseating scene, accompanied by the sound of crunching bone and tearing tissue: . Noah realized by primal instinct that the ant was attempting to "molt" from its shattered half to break free. Although this molting might kill it, he was not ready to gamble his life on the "possibility" of its death.

  He had to end this with his own hands.

  He reached into his pocket with his right hand and drew his old knife; it was small and in a bad condition, but in his eyes now, it was the key to survival. He looked at his body, naked except for filth and blood, and decided to act. He tore what remained of his tattered shirt into two pieces. He wrapped the first piece around his shattered arm to secure it as a primitive splint, and with his teeth gritting over the fabric, he pulled the knot so tight his eyes nearly bulged from the pain. As for the second piece, he used it to bind the knife firmly to his right palm, using his mouth to tie the final knot until the knife became an extension of his body.

  "With my current body, a direct confrontation is suicide... I must strike where the beast bleeds."

  Noah began to move with heavy steps, limping with his slanted body, circling the ant to create a safety distance. The ant was moving its antennae frantically, trying to track this human "flea" that kept disappearing from its line of sight, which only increased its agitation and screeching.

  Noah reached his target; he stood before the hideous gashes in the ant’s back—openings nearly the size of his own body, emitting a viscous heat and the stench of purple blood. He focused his gaze on the largest gap, where the ant’s inner flesh lay exposed and ready to be torn.

  Noah let out a choked exhale, and in a moment where fear ceased to exist, he threw his broken body into that dark fissure.

  (Tshk... Tshk... Tshk!)

  Noah began to stab with a madness no one had ever known. He drove the knife in with all his weight, twisting the blade inside the ant’s entrails. The purple blood flooded over his face and body, and he screamed with every stab, as if emptying all his spite and the oppression of his years into that pale white flesh.

  "? If you’re enjoying the descent into the Void, a rating or follow helps more than you think."