**Chapter 1: The Blood-Stained Oath**

The Tien Era was an age of wonders, where ancient artifacts of unimaginable power lay scattered across the land. Legends spoke of a hundred such relics, each forged from sorrow, rage, and the undying will of a broken man. These artifacts were not mere tools—they were alive, bound by blood and vengeance, whispering promises of destruction to those who wielded them.

Ten nations stood in fragile equilibrium, each holding ten of these relics to maintain the balance of power. Among them, the **Nation of Will** rose as a titan, its people unbreakable, their king, **Han Shein**, a colossus whose indomitable spirit had crushed armies beneath his heel. His nation thrived on strength, on the corpses of those who dared oppose him. But even he did not know the true origin of the artifacts he so carefully guarded.

Long before the ten nations, before the balance, there was only **Kadhar**.

A man who had once been nothing more than a humble villager, a man who had loved deeply and lost everything.

The night the world shattered for him was painted in blood. His wife—**radiant, kind, the very light of his life**—had been torn from him in the most grotesque manner. The village, once peaceful, had been consumed by an unseen darkness, a **cloud of greed and hatred** that twisted hearts and turned neighbors into monsters. They had descended upon her like beasts, defiling her, butchering her, leaving her in pieces upon the floor of their home.

When Kadhar returned, the world stopped.

He did not scream. He did not weep.

He simply knelt beside her mutilated body, his fingers tracing the cold edges of her severed limbs. Her face, once so full of life, was now a canvas of horror, her belly—their child, their future—stabbed beyond recognition. The air was thick with the stench of iron and sin.

And in that moment, something inside him **snapped**.

With trembling hands, he gathered her remains, arranging them as though she were merely sleeping. Then, he pressed his palm into the pool of her blood and whispered a name—**a dark, forgotten name**.

The earth trembled. Shadows coiled around him. A voice, ancient and hungry, slithered into his mind.

*"What do you desire, broken king?"*

**"Power,"** Kadhar answered, his voice hollow. **"Power to burn this world to ashes."**

A contract was sealed.

One hundred drops of undried blood. One hundred ordinary stones. One hundred curses given form.

As each drop touched the stones, they **twisted**, warping into something **other**, something alive. They pulsed with malice, whispering promises of ruin. Kadhar took them, one by one, and as each artifact fused with his flesh, agony wracked his body. His heart threatened to burst, his veins burned like fire—but he endured.

For her.

For the woman who had been his everything.

When it was done, he stood, no longer a man, but a **vessel of vengeance**. His first act was to bury her with the dignity she had been denied. Then, with a thought, he called upon the **Entity of Creation**, and from nothingness, a grand palace rose—a monument to the life they should have had. The walls breathed with her scent, the halls echoed with the ghost of her laughter.

But she was gone.

And the world would pay.

With the **Entity of Summoning**, he called forth an army—**a hundred phantom knights**, clad in spectral armor, their swords dripping with eternal malice. Each was a reaper, capable of slaughtering hundreds without pause.

*"Guard her,"* he commanded. *"Let no defiler step upon this sacred ground."*

Then, with his wife’s blood still staining his hands, Kadhar stepped beyond the palace gates—into a world that had forgotten mercy.

The slaughter began.