"The Crimson Dharma” Recovered journal pages. Author: Unknown

ENTRY 1 – DAY 0

They told me it was enlightenment.

That the path to truth was paved in silence, discipline, and the shedding of flesh. They handed me robes the color of dried blood. The compound gates closed behind me with the sound of something ancient being buried.

They took my name. I am now Ash Body 47.

I thought this was a spiritual retreat. I was wrong.

ENTRY 3 – DAY 5

I haven't spoken in days. Silence is mandatory unless granted “voice permission” by the High Bodhisattva. We sleep in shifts, three hours at most. No clocks. No windows. I don’t know what day it is anymore.

They give us offerings—not food. It tastes like meat, but no one talks about what it is. Sometimes, I think it screams when I bite into it.

I think I’ve lost ten pounds. My skin itches all the time. The others say that’s the impurity leaving my body.

One of the older monks whispered to me in the laundry room:

“If they call your name during the Crimson Chant, don’t answer.”

He was gone by morning. His sleeping mat was soaked in something thick and black.

ENTRY 5 – DAY 9

We cleaned the Lotus Room today. Blood everywhere. Not metaphorical—actual blood. Pooled in the floor’s carvings, crusted under the altar. They said a brother achieved "body transcendence."

I saw what was left of him.

They had flayed his skin into a spiral and nailed it to the walls. His eyes were in a bowl. His tongue was stitched to a scroll.

The others chanted. I wanted to scream. I bit through my lip instead.

One monk locked eyes with me and smiled. His teeth were filed into points.

ENTRY 8 – NIGHT OF THE PURIFICATION

They woke us with gongs. Midnight, maybe? The air smelled like incense and burnt hair.

They brought in Ash Body 11, gagged, sobbing. He had confessed to impure thoughts. They called it a mercy sacrifice.

We were told to watch—to learn.

The High Bodhisattva used a hooked blade to open his stomach like a bag. The insides steamed in the cold. They pulled out his intestines while he was still alive, chanting verses from the Crimson Dharma.

Then they passed around his chopped liver pieces in a brass dish.

They made me eat it.

I vomited. They beat me with rods. I think they broke a rib.

I can still taste it.

ENTRY 10 – ESCAPE ATTEMPT

I tried to run.

The gates were electrified. One girl got caught on the fence. She didn’t die right away. Her eyes melted. Her hands smoked.

I turned back before they caught me.

There are dogs. Not normal dogs. Hairless. Too many teeth. One of them spoke—mimicked a monk’s voice.

I cried for hours in the waste pit.

When I returned, no one said anything. But someone had carved the Dharma symbol into my back while I slept.

My sheets were stiff with blood. I think I’m losing time.

ENTRY 12 – THE INNER TEMPLE

I was selected to clean the inner sanctum.

It's a cave beneath the compound. Wet. Pulsing. The walls aren’t stone—they’re meat, cured, never rotting. Covered in sutras stitched from human hair.

In the center, there’s a throne of bones and a figure sitting on it, half-hidden in shadow. It doesn’t move. But I felt it looking into me.

A voice whispered inside my skull:

“You are my mouth. You are my hunger. You will open the flesh.”

They made me kneel. They poured hot wax into my ears and nose. Said it would preserve purity. I screamed. They told me the pain was prayer.

ENTRY 15 – THE MEAL

Tonight they fed us something sacred.

A stew. Rich. Thick. Chunks of meat. It tasted… familiar.

Later I found a human finger at the bottom of my bowl.

They said we’d all consumed the High Bodhisattva’s wisdom. His actual wisdom. I think it was his brain. Cooked into broth.

Some of the others began shaking. One girl seized up and foamed at the mouth. They clapped and called it “spiritual climax.”

I tried to throw it up. Nothing came out.

I think it’s inside me now.

ENTRY 17 – THE VISIONS

I don’t sleep. I see the Bodhisattva’s true form when I blink: miles tall, limbs like centipedes, skin stitched from converts. Its eyes drip with pus. Its voice is the sound of bone grinding on stone.

It showed me the world devoured—cities writhing in rivers of blood. It feeds on belief. On ritual. On pain.

It lives beneath us.

We’re not worshipping it.

We’re incubating it.

ENTRY 20 – LAST ENTRY

They said I was ready for rebirth. They took me to the altar, carved open my arms, and poured my blood into the mouth beneath the floor.

But they made a mistake. perhaps, for the first time.

They didn’t cut deep enough.

When they left me there to “ascend,” I crawled out. Through shit tunnels and corpses. I found an old septic pipe. I emerged miles from the compound, naked, bleeding, screaming into a rice field.

I’m in a hospital now.

They say the cult burned down. No survivors.

But I hear the chant every time I close my eyes.

“Open the flesh. Feed the hunger. Become eternal”

And sometimes, I wake up…

...with blood under my nails.