[The Third Door – The Inferno of White Salt]
In this desolate, alabaster desert, silence was not merely the absence of sound; it was a living entity that gnawed at the eardrums, just as the salt gnawed at my pores. I stood for an eternity, staring at that wooden door suspended in the heart of the white sky. Ten meters of absolute nothingness separated me from salvation. There was no stone, no timber, no raw material to build a path upward... except for "Me."
Rrrrip... The sound was not unfamiliar, but in this stillness, it echoed like thunder rending the veil of the universe. It was the sound of my skin being torn away, layer by layer. It felt like old, soaked cloth that had rotted in water for years, waiting for me to shred it with my own hands. I no longer felt pain as humans do; pain had become a routine language—an annoying whisper in the background of my consciousness.
I sat upon salt grains that sank their acidic fangs into my open wounds. I extended my left leg. In that moment, this limb was no longer a part of "Rai." It was no longer the extremity that once ran through school corridors. It was now "Construction Material." I closed my eyes and drove my blackened, razor-sharp nails deep, bypassing the dermal tissue and plunging into the living muscle that throbbed beneath my hand in primal terror.
My body convulsed. Every nerve, every cell, every carbon atom in my being shrieked at me in sheer disbelief: "Stop! What are you doing, you madman?" It was the scream of instinct refusing annihilation, but my will had abandoned the borders of humanity long ago.
I was weeping. They weren't dramatic tears, but a sorrowful "seepage" from eyes scorched by the white glare. Salty tears fell onto my wounds, fueling the fire, mixing with the blood that stained my hands a deep, royal crimson.
"I'm sorry..." I whispered to my body, sobs choking my parched throat. "I'm sorry, my only friend. You carried me when everyone else failed me. Today, I am the one who fails you."
I reached the bone. It was a dull, pale white, matching the floor of this cursed desert. Now came the part that required the shattering of logic. I raised my right hand, concentrated every ounce of strength into its joints, transformed it into a steel sledgehammer, and brought it down upon my exposed shinbone with all the despair I possessed.
CRACK!
The break was clean, sounding like a dry branch snapping in winter. In that instant, pain exploded—white, blinding, and absolute. I felt as though I had been struck by celestial lightning. I severed the lower half of my leg and held it in my trembling hands. It was heavy, warm, and viscous, radiating a life-heat that was already beginning to cool. I planted the jagged bone end into the salt to steady it.
"This... is the first step."
[The Monster Within]
Then came the true beast: Hunger. It wasn't a hunger of the stomach, but a cry from my cells demanding fuel to repair the destruction I had wrought. The [Frenzied Regeneration] skill began to pull from a zeroed-out reservoir. The scent of my own hot blood triggered something prehistoric, dark, and ancient in the corridors of my brain. I needed energy for my leg to grow back, and where would I find energy in this wasteland?
I looked at the scrap of flesh hanging from the severed limb—the part I hadn't used for construction. I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars and forced the raw meat into my mouth.
Bile rose in my throat, threatening to suffocate me, but I swallowed it by force. I was chewing myself. I tasted of the salt that coated the world and the iron of the oppression that coated my soul.
"Eat," I commanded myself through bitter sobs. "Eat so you don't die. Eat to kill this weakness."
[Day Three... or Perhaps Century Three?]
I lost the perception of time. In this desert, time does not move forward; it loops in hollow circles of agony. I was no longer the "Rai" the world knew. I was not human, nor was I a ravenous beast. I was a "Mobile Slaughterhouse." I was the raw material, the architect, and the victim.
Beneath that wooden door floating coldly in the sky, a "Tower" rose. It was not a ladder in the traditional sense; it was a grotesque, leaning, nauseating heap that would sicken the heart of the Devil himself. Dozens of severed legs that had grown and then been harvested, twisted arms used as struts, and piles of ribs I had torn from my own chest to serve as structural nails... all stacked atop one another in bloody, chaotic geometry.
The white sun baked the flesh, turning it a dead, ashen grey. The stench—gods, the stench was worse than death itself. The smell of my own rotting meat choked me, clinging to my tattered clothes and blood-matted hair. I was a broken biological machine: Cut. Eat. Wait for regeneration. Build. Climb. Repeat.
In a moment of frailty, my foot slipped. The congealed blood and rot made the "ladder" as slick as if it were coated in oil. I fell. I tumbled down the heap, my face striking the limbs I had severed yesterday and the day before. I hit the salt floor with a force that shattered my right shoulder.
I lay there, stripped of dignity, as gaunt as a skeleton draped in translucent skin. I looked at the white sky with dull eyes.
"Enough..." my broken mind whispered, that part still clinging to the remnants of my humanity. "Just die here. This is enough. No door in existence is worth this self-desecration."
I closed my eyes, surrendering to the salt that began to cover my body like a natural shroud. But then, I caught a glimpse of the "Tower" I had fallen from. I saw my very first left leg—the one that carried my dreams of escape—wedged in the middle, turned dark green with rot.
"That... was mine," a dark consciousness hissed within me. "I cut it with my own hand. I chewed it with my own teeth. I spat out its bone to build this monstrosity."
If I died now, every bite, every piece of my flesh currently in my stomach, every scream I uttered while sawing through my bone with the blade of my will... it would all be Waste. That was the true horror that woke me. Not death, but the "Waste" of my suffering. To be a fool who mutilated himself only to end up a corpse beside a pile of his own biological refuse.
"No..." My trembling hand moved against the salt. It wasn't anger that moved me, nor hope. It was pure refusal to be a joke in the records of this cursed System. "I did not eat myself... for nothing."
[The Final Ascent]
I reached the summit. I stood on a swaying platform of bone and mashed pulp. The door was directly in front of me, radiating an unknown fragrance. But there was a gap. Half a meter separated me from the handle. I looked at my body; there was nothing left to cut without losing my balance and falling into the abyss again. I was a walking miracle of a skeleton.
I looked at my left hand, gripping the edge to steady me. I looked at my right hand, the claws black, long, and ready for harvest.
"Goodbye..."
With a swift, desperate strike filled with the last of my madness, I severed my left hand at the wrist.
"AAAGH!"
The scream was muffled and raspy; my vocal cords had frayed days ago. I took my severed hand, blood geysering from my wrist, washing the white door crimson. I placed it in the air before me as a final step. I stepped on it with my remaining foot.
I rose... those few centimeters were the difference between life and nothingness.
I grabbed the handle with my only remaining hand. I turned it with every ounce of my resolve. The door swung wide. I collapsed into the pitch-black darkness, leaving behind the "Ladder of Shame" to collapse like a house of cards, and leaving my left hand there—an eternal witness to the price I paid.
[The Insight of the Monster]
My face hit a cold, hard, comfortable floor. Darkness... what a magnificent, soothing darkness! No heat to melt the skin, no salt to gnaw the wounds. I rolled onto my back, gasping like a fish returned to water. My severed left wrist was boiling, seething with white steam. I felt the bone growing like a seed, the flesh weaving itself like a spider's silk to build a new hand.
"It's over..." I closed my eyes, wanting to sleep for a century.
But the silence did not last. Suddenly, my head exploded from within. I felt as if a giant hand had driven its thumbs into my eye sockets and squeezed my brain with all its might.
"GGGGHHAA!" I arched off the floor, clawing at my eyes from the sheer heat radiating behind them. They were melting, changing, being reshaped like molten glass boiling in a crucible. I felt the optic nerves tearing and reconnecting to pathways that didn't exist before—pathways carved by Sin.
A message appeared in the darkness of my consciousness, but it wasn't blue... it was a deep, bloody red.
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE TRANSCENDED THE LIMITS OF "HUMAN DIGNITY" AND BREACHED THE WALLS OF "ABSOLUTE SURVIVAL." YOU ATE OF YOUR OWN FLESH TO BUILD YOUR PATH. NOW, THE SYSTEM GRANTS YOU INSIGHT BEFITTING A MONSTER OF YOUR OWN MAKING.
[EPIC REWARD UNLOCKED:] EYE OF SIN – LEVEL 1 (ABSOLUTE RED)
The pain vanished instantly, replaced by a biting cold that settled in my pupils. I opened my eyes slowly.
I gasped. The darkness was no longer dark; it had vanished from my vocabulary. I did not see "things" anymore; I saw their glowing "essence." I saw dust particles swimming in the air like tiny red sparks. I looked at my new hand; I didn't see skin—I saw what was beneath the skin.
I saw the arteries pulsing with a bright crimson light, the flow of blood like rivers of liquid fire, the contraction of muscles and the nerve fibers transmitting electrical impulses. The world around me had transformed into a complex, moving grid of red and black lines.
I crawled toward a reflective metallic surface on a nearby wall. I needed to see what I had become. I looked at my face... it was the face of someone who had returned from the grave. Pale, gaunt, stained with dried blood.
But the eyes... they were not mine.
The features of a human eye had vanished completely. No sclera, no iris, no pupil. What I saw in the reflection were two "embers" burning with an absolute, deep-red glow. Eyes drowned entirely in a bottomless sea of radiant blood.
Yet, deep within this terrifying, liquid redness, I noticed something else that sent a cold shiver through my exhausted body. There was a "Script." Two strange lines, as dark as ancient ink, floating inside the eyeball itself, just behind the red glow. They crossed in an anomalous, sharp geometric fashion, as if trying to form an ancient "Word" or "Symbol"—a language I had never seen, one my human brain could not decode. But it throbbed with a mysterious, heavy power, as if it were the signature of the Entity that had granted me this strength.
I blinked my new, blood-soaked eyes, and the black symbol flickered within them. I let the world slow down in my vision and felt the power flooding my veins like a deluge. I smiled, revealing teeth stained with the red of my own remains.
"I see you..." I whispered to the darkness, to the doors yet to come, and to the fates waiting behind the walls. My red eyes widened to consume everything. "I see all of you... from the inside. And I know exactly where your weaknesses lie."
[The Fourth Door: OPEN.] [Next Phase: THE HUNT.]