SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 102: Sage with a Weeping Blood.

In the time when the stars were still learning how to blink, and the mountains were only a few inches tall, there lived a man named Elian. Elian was a collector of things that did not exist. He had a jar full of the sound of a secret being kept, a box containing the shadow of a flame, and a map that showed the way to nowhere in particular.

One day, Elian decided to find the end of a circle. He walked until his boots turned into dust, and then he walked on his thoughts. He arrived at the Edge of the World, a place where the air tastes like forgotten memories and the clouds are made of unwritten poetry. There, he saw a man sitting on a chair carved from a single block of frozen silence.

The man was not a god, not yet. He was a Sage, but his skin was made of parchment, and his eyes were holes through which one could see the back of the universe. He was holding a needle made of logic and a thread made of a mother’s first tear. He was sewing his own shadow back onto his feet, but every time the needle pierced the ground, the earth groaned and bled a liquid that looked like liquid rubies.

"Why do you sew what is already gone?" Elian asked, sitting on a rock that was actually a sleeping giant’s tooth.

The Sage looked up, and for a moment, Elian saw a thousand years of rain falling inside the man’s pupils. "To become a god," the Sage whispered, his voice sounding like a mountain cracking in half, "one must first learn to bleed for things that never happened. Divinity is not a throne; it is a wound that refuses to heal because it has fallen in love with the pain."

Elian didn’t understand, but he liked the way the words tasted—bitter, like burnt sugar. He watched as the Sage began to weep. But he did not weep water. He wept blood, and the blood did not fall to the ground. It floated. It drifted upward, forming a crown of crimson thorns that hovered above his head.

"The birth of a god is a messy thing," the Sage said, and his laughter sounded like glass breaking in a velvet bag. "Most people think a god is born from a golden egg or a burst of light. But a god is actually born when a man becomes so heavy with sorrow that the world can no longer hold him. He falls upward. He breaks through the ceiling of reality and becomes the sky."

As Elian watched, the Sage began to change. His fingers elongated until they became the roots of trees that would not be planted for another century. His breath became the wind that carries the scent of rain. The blood he wept began to crystallize, turning into stars that were so bright they hurt the ears.

"Is it lonely?" Elian asked.

"Everything is lonely when it is everything," the Sage replied. "When you are the mountain, you miss the feeling of climbing. When you are the ocean, you miss the feeling of being thirsty. To be a god is to be a house with no doors, where every room is filled with a different version of the same ghost."

The Sage’s body began to dissolve into pure geometry. He was becoming a circle, a square, a line that had no end. The blood from his eyes was now a river that flowed toward the horizon, carving a path through the nothingness.

"Listen closely, little collector," the Sage said, though he no longer had a mouth. The voice came from the stones, the air, and the marrow of Elian’s own bones. "People will look for me in the temples. They will look for me in the clouds. They will look for me in the sparks of a dying fire. But a god has no home, only a place where he stopped being a man."

The air began to thicken with nonsense. The birds began to swim in the dirt, and the fish flew through the branches of trees made of glass. Logic was melting. The Sage was no longer a person; he was an event. He was the moment between a question and an answer.

"They will call me the Sage with the Weeping Blood," the voice echoed, fading like the smell of a dream after you wake up. "And they will wonder where I went when the blood ran dry. But I am not gone. I am simply buried beneath the weight of my own wisdom."

Then, the "birth" reached its peak. There was no explosion. Instead, there was a sudden, violent silence. It was the kind of silence that makes you realize you have been screaming for your whole life and only just stopped. The Sage was gone. In his place was a single, perfect star that pulsed with a dark, red light.

Elian sat alone at the Edge of the World. The rock he sat on was no longer a giant’s tooth; it was just a rock. The air no longer tasted like memories. Everything had become ordinary again, except for the small book that had appeared in his lap. It was bound in leather that felt like skin, and the ink was the color of dried blood.

He opened the book and began to read the nonsense.

"The first step to truth is to lie to the moon. The second step is to walk until your shadow gets tired and sits down to rest. If you seek the one who became the sky, do not look up. Look down into the throat of the earth."

Elian turned the pages, finding poems that made no sense and philosophies that contradicted themselves. One page said, "Life is a dream that a rock is having about being a bird." Another said, "The truth is a cat that only comes to you when you stop calling its name."

But hidden within the ramblings of the ascended Sage, Elian found a passage that felt different. It was written in a script that seemed to ache.

"Where the twin rivers of ’Never’ and ’Always’ meet, there is a mountain that has no peak. At its base, where the red lilies bloom only when it snows, lies the heart of the one who wept. The world is a grave, and the sky is its tombstone. If you wish to find the Sage’s rest, follow the path of the weeping stone. Seek the place where the sun goes to die, and the moon is born from a drop of blood. There, under the roots of the tree that grows downward, the Sage sleeps in a house of glass."

Elian looked at the star in the sky—the red one that pulsed like a heartbeat. He realized that the story of the god’s birth was also the story of his funeral. To become a god was to die as a man, and the Sage had left his humanity behind in a place that the world had forgotten.

The hidden message was clear to Elian, though it would be nonsense to anyone else. The grave of the Sage, the source of the weeping blood, was not in some far-off realm. It was at the center of the world’s greatest contradiction.

"Beneath the Imperial Throne, where the gold is made of tears, and the stone is made of breath. The Sage’s blood still flows, watering the roots of the empire that feeds on his sorrow."

Elian closed the book. He understood now that power was not something you gained; it was something you paid for with the pieces of yourself you could never get back. He left the Edge of the World and walked back toward the city of men, carrying the jar of secrets, the box of shadows, and now, the book of the Sage.

As he walked, he sang a song that had no melody:

"The Sage weeps red, the world turns blue,

The old is dead, the god is new.

Look for the grave where the silence grows,

Where the blood of the wise in the darkness flows."

He knew that one day, someone would find the book. Someone would read the nonsense and the philosophy and think it was just a fairy tale. They would read about the birth of a god and think it was a beautiful dream. But that person, someone like Lena, perhaps, would feel the magnetic pull. They would feel the tingle in their mana. They would realize that the "Sage with a Weeping Blood" wasn’t a myth.

He was a map.

And the map led to a breakthrough that would break the world in two.

Lena sat in the dust of the library, the last words of the story echoing in her mind. Her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. The book in her hands was vibrating, the red ink of the title seemingly fresh, as if it had just been written with a shaking hand.

"Sage with a Weeping Blood."

She didn’t just read the name. She felt the sorrow. She felt the power. And most of all, she felt the hidden direction pointing her toward a place she never thought she would have to go.

The breakthrough she needed wasn’t in a cultivation manual. It was in the blood of a man who had become a god, buried beneath the very city she was trying to protect.