Blink.

Malik found himself waking up to someone shaking his shoulder hard, like they were trying to rouse a dead man, and a rough voice saying:

"Hey. Hey! Get up."

His eyes snapped open, and the light from a lantern hanging on a nearby wooden post felt like needles driving into his skull.

He had no idea where he was.

The ground beneath him held sand but mainly cold rock, making him realize that he was at the entrance of a cave.

Daylight stretched behind the man standing over him, confirming that realization, but the light was bright, as if the Suns had started thefir ascent.

...How long had he been out?

"Did he hit your head too hard?"

The man—Judas, Malik’s foggy brain supplied—snapped his fingers in front of his face.

"Come on. We don’t have all day. Get up."

Malik pushed himself up slowly; his body was aching, but thankfully, nothing felt broken, and nothing felt bleeding, so he counted himself fine.

He looked at the man properly and saw someone with average height, average build, and an average face.

It was the kind of person you forgot five seconds after looking away.

But his eyes held no warmth, only a coldness that spoke of someone who had done this... whatever this was, many hundreds of times before.

"Are you finally awake?"

Judas gestured towards the dark.

"Go deeper in, old man. There’s work to do."

Malik blinked at the lack of explanation and glanced around.

Finding the outside familiar, he quickly realized that he was next to the town he ran towards before the scarred man grabbed him.

And yes, ’next to’ the town, not inside it.

They were at the mouth of a cave system built into the side of a rocky hill.

Other people shuffled in and out of the cave entrance, their faces hollow.

Slaves, no doubt. All had dark stains covering their hands.

Dark blood.

’Hm.’

Malik was the Sultan of this planet.

Since his transformation, he had killed millions of Demons, escaped, killed more, gotten ambushed by invaders, killed them, saved a little owl niece, saved a little sister, escaped again, survived sure death, sandworms, and whatever else this world had thrown at him.

He couldn’t help but think about how things had gotten to this point.

There wasn’t really much of a break for him there, was there?

Yes, there was no time for him to properly breathe, just one fight after another, one near-death experience after another, one interruption after another, and now this:

Standing at the entrance of a cave, being told where to go by a nobody with dead eyes.

He wondered what he could even do about it.

Class Twelve Magi, a Bringer of Light.

Sure, the title sounded impressive, but it meant nothing in practical terms. Just a fraction of the Rukh in his Soul, not enough to fight his way out against at least a few dozen slavers.

So he did the only thing he could do and walked into the cave without a word.

The temperature dropped the moment he stepped inside, damp air filling his lungs, carrying the smell of something rotten and sweet that made his stomach turn.

Malik told himself not to think about it and walk.

The tunnel sloped downward with lanterns hanging from the walls every few feet, casting flickering shadows. The uneven floor held sand still and the occasional puddle of something dark that he refused to examine.

To make what was already bad worse, he heard ragged coughing that came from lungs full of something they should not have held.

When he turned a corner, he saw slaves sitting against the walls of the tunnel, slumped over and barely moving.

Their bodies showed cuts and bruises, while their clothes were soaked with even more dark blood.

One of them reached out as he passed, a woman maybe, her fingers brushing his ankle.

"Water... please..."

But Malik did not stop.

He had no water to give her, and stopping would only remind him that he could do nothing.

This was a place of horror, it seemed.

He kept walking until the tunnel opened up, only to then suddenly stop.

Two lives that he lived.

Each one housed fragmented memories.

Yet he still remembered the many things he saw.

Battlefields, mass graves, the aftermath of war, and destruction that made normal people lose their minds.

He knew tragedy and brutality.

But he had never seen anything like this.

Before him, piles and piles of bodies were stacked against the cave walls, stretching farther than the lantern light could reach.

The bodies looked fresh and not yet rotting, their dark skin intact, Corrupted.

He recognized them immediately, having killed enough of them to know exactly what he was looking at:

Hundreds of dead Demons, maybe thousands.

The slaves who could still move cut them open with small knives that should have made the work impossible, but the flesh of the Corrupted parted like butter under them, revealing the cavities beneath.

Malik watched a slave reach into the chest of a Demon and pull out a dark, shiny heart pulsing with a sickly light. Then, without any change of pace, drop it into a basket at their feet and move to the next body.

’Fruit picking...’

Only the ’fruits’ were the hearts, and the trees were dead Demons.

He had no idea what the slavers needed the hearts for, and right now, he did not care.

’Right now,’ he needed to figure out how to escape.

"Hey."

Suddenly, a hand grabbed his shoulder, and Malik tensed with every muscle screaming to fight, but he forced himself to stay still.

Turning around slowly, he looked at whoever touched him with the most neutral expression he could manage.

A different man stood there, bigger than Judas, carrying a whip in one hand and a stack of baskets in the other.

"Have you Fallen, Black Eye?"