Cherreads

Ashes and Tears

The_One_True_X
Five years ago, the sky tore open. Rifts bled monsters into the world—beasts beyond reason, nightmares given flesh. Nations fell. Borders vanished. Civilization collapsed into factions and fortified cities, clawing to survive a reality rewritten by cosmic horror. Amid the chaos, a new kind of human emerged—Hunters, awakened with powers no one understands. They are soldiers, mercenaries, and weapons in a war with no end. Ha Joon is not one of them. Or so he thinks. Plagued by memories he doesn’t trust and a name tied to shadows, Ha Joon is pulled into a brutal training program hidden deep within the forest. Overseen by Chi Long—an enigmatic woman whose discipline is as cruel as it is surgical—he is stripped of comfort, humanity, and choice. His only company: Eun Byol, a former idol kidnapped and thrown into the same nightmare, her spirit breaking as she’s forced to become something she was never meant to be. Together, they must survive Chi Long’s merciless tests, the monsters that lurk beyond the trees, and the truth buried in their blood. All while two names—Ash and Tears—haunt the edges of the world like ghosts. Whispers say they’ve seen the end. And it begins again with Ha Joon.
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I Leash Emperors: The Dead Shout. I Smile

The dead scream for justice. They have been screaming for centuries. In my office on the 88th floor, the sound is indistinguishable from the hum of the paper shredder. I have twelve of history's most dangerous minds in my vault—Caesar, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Wu Zetian, and eight others whose names are synonymous with the word empire. I stripped them of their crowns and their divinity and left them with the only two things that survive death intact: greed, and memory. Then I put them to work. The boardroom is their new battlefield. Stocks are their arrows. Hostile takeovers are their sieges. The First Emperor runs my supply chains with the same draconian efficiency that built the Great Wall. The Queen of the Nile runs my PR division and calls it beneath her. Caesar rewrites the legal architecture of an entire financial district before breakfast and considers it a light morning. The rules are simple. The Emperor with the highest ROI earns twenty-four hours of full sensory restoration—taste, warmth, the burn of real alcohol, everything the synthetic body cannot feel. The Emperor at the bottom earns something else: a Hell Start. Reincarnation as a beggar, a eunuch, a sacrificial lamb in the next cycle. They know this. It keeps them focused. Every full moon, the tavern opens. The millions they killed in their lifetimes gather as my Jury—compressed into a medium that runs on pure hatred, sustained by a spite so concentrated it has proven, against all known physics, to be a measurable energy source. They vote. They decide which of their tormentors leads the next charge, and which of the most venomous among them earns a temporary body to return to the waking world. Wu Zetian shed her imperial robes to kneel at my feet and beg for a private review of her HR directorship. Arsinoe—murdered by her own sister two thousand years ago—spent six weeks haunting Cleopatra's servers and built a perfect weapon before she ever asked me for the body to deliver it. Cleopatra herself believes her beauty is a currency I will eventually accept. She has not yet understood that in this building, the only currency is performance. I do not need loyalty. I need sharp blades. I do not trade in mercy. I trade in ROI. They believe this is my game. They do not ask why I need to win it. Rules? I am the rule. Harem? The highest-tier spoils of a game they don't know the stakes of. Every arc is a different world. Every world is a wound that needs closing. The Emperors do not know this. They never do. Perhaps the last thing standing between their world and oblivion is a man who stopped caring about it long ago. Let the dead shout. I smile. I have to. Tags: #InfiniteFlow #DarkFantasy #HighStakesPolitics #DivineAutocracy #GrimDark #RuthlessMC #HistoricalFigures #DarkHarem Content Advisory: Heavy power dynamics, sensory manipulation, historical figures in morally compromised positions. MC is an unapologetic autocrat. No redemption arcs.
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