Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 141 – The Boy Who Watched Me Kill

The blood-drenched valley did not weep for its dead.

It sucked them dry.

Veins of once-living Qi pulsed beneath the surface—black, pulsing, erratic like maggots writhing in an open wound. Crimson mist curled over shattered bones and calcified roots. Cracked statues of ancient cultivators jutted from the earth, their expressions twisted in final prayers never answered. The wind moaned with half-formed syllables, as if language itself had been eviscerated here.

And Rin Xie walked through it.

Silent. Untouched. Sovereign.

His death aura had grown opaque, layered like volcanic obsidian. Every breath he took now reeked of entropy. Each step drew runes of withering onto the soil. His Death Core pulsed in synchrony with the valley's corruption, drawing in entropy, memory, soul-rot, and silence. He was no longer a visitor here.

He was becoming this place.

Behind him, barefoot and bleeding, staggered a boy with soot-colored skin and wide, glassy eyes. He said nothing. Had said nothing for three days. His clothes were rags. His left hand was missing. His ribs jutted out like broken branches. Still, he followed.

Always at a distance. Always quiet.

Rin never turned.

But he knew.

He felt the boy's gaze, like a dying star refusing to go dark.

The beasts came at dusk.

Corrupted soulbeasts, warped by the Valley of Thousand Unburials. The first was a Fang-Toothed Wight Ape, its limbs gangrenous and fused with rusted spirit chains. Its breath wept fetid soulfire, and the talismans embedded in its eyes screamed.

Rin did nothing.

He knelt beside a cracked altar of bone and ash and whispered to it. Not to pray—but to mock it.

The Wight Ape roared and lunged.

Not at Rin.

But at the boy.

The boy didn't scream.

His body moved—on instinct, like a shadow catching flame. He rolled under the creature's swipe and scrambled to the left, picking up a jagged shard of spiritual glass from the bones. When the ape charged again, he stabbed it in the throat.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't fast. But it was enough.

The beast's shriek scattered the dead crows above the valley. Its soul was already half-rotted, and when the shard pierced its windpipe, the collapse was immediate. It gurgled and spasmed, choking on its own rebounded Qi, before it crumbled into nothing but nerve-writhing smoke.

The boy collapsed, trembling. Blood smeared his face. But his eyes were clear.

Watching.

Not Rin.

Himself.

Later, by a stream that bled red, Rin crouched beside a root-pierced corpse. He carved symbols onto the rotting flesh using a strand of his Death Qi. The corpse—what was left of a once-proud Nascent Soul cultivator—convulsed as its tongue flapped open.

A whisper crawled free.

"Mercy..."

Rin crushed its skull beneath his heel.

Only then did he speak.

"To die once is to end. To die right is to begin."

He didn't turn, but he raised his voice. "How many deaths have you had, boy?"

The silence that followed was not empty.

It was pregnant.

The boy stepped forward through rust-colored grass. His lips parted, barely.

"One," he rasped. "When my mother gave me away to the Bone Keepers."

Rin stood. "And yet you live."

"I don't think I do."

Rin's smile was thin and sharp. "You do—because something in you refused to die properly. You rot... but you burn."

He pointed toward the valley's edge, where the cliff curved over into the gulch of butchered spirits. "There are worse things than dying. That's why I won't protect you."

The boy said nothing. His legs shook. But he didn't step back.

The next day, Rin led him to the Garden of Marrowed Silence.

An old battlefield, now overtaken by soulgrass and groaning bone-trees. The winds carried the screams of those who had failed to pass the Trial of Cessation. Each scream formed glyphs in the air—ancient curses of the Deathless Sect.

In the center lay the Lotus of Silent Weeping.

An artifact.

Alive.

Its petals were blades. It fed on noise.

Rin stood at the edge and spoke aloud: "Let's see if you're worth not killing."

He kicked a stone into the garden.

Silence swallowed it whole.

Then he turned and walked away, leaving the boy behind.

The Lotus rustled.

The air grew dense. Not with Qi—but with absence. The pressure of nothing. The threat of stillness.

The boy stepped forward.

One foot. Two.

A scream ghosted past his ear, but he did not flinch.

The Lotus flexed.

And the boy ran.

Straight toward it.

It lashed out—petals slicing air.

A toe flew. Then part of his scalp.

He did not stop.

He reached the Lotus.

He grabbed its stem.

It shrieked inwards—imploding, swallowing its own petals.

And when it was done, the boy still stood, half-bald, skin shredded.

Holding the Lotus root.

Breathing.

Rin took it from his hand.

The boy didn't ask for thanks.

"Why follow me?" Rin asked then, not out of curiosity—but necessity.

The boy answered:

"Because when you killed them, you looked free." freewebnσvel.cѳm

They traveled through bone swamps and soul-glass dunes.

Each day, Rin lured another horror toward the boy.

Each day, the boy bled.

But he lived.

Not because he was strong.

But because he would not allow himself to be weak.

Rin saw it clearly: this boy, this thing following behind him—he was not good. Not brave. Not innocent.

He was a mirror.

The same rot. The same refusal. The same hunger to mean something again.

In the depths of the Veins of Withering, Rin witnessed the boy kill an infant wraith that had latched onto his spine. He did it with bare hands. Broke its jaw, pulled its spine free, and used it to fashion a makeshift whip to drive away the hungering shades.

He didn't flinch.

He watched Rin the entire time.

Not for approval.

But for clarity.

As if he were begging to see who he'd become.

By the thirteenth night, they reached the Obsidian Maw, a cavern where the air hung heavy with the scent of burnt spirit flesh. Rin sat on a slab of soulstone, meditating, refining the Lotus of Silent Weeping into a death-talisman for his ribcage.

The boy sat opposite him, staring at the black flame.

Neither spoke for hours.

Then Rin opened his eyes.

And said:

"You are not a name anymore."

The boy blinked.

"What...?"

"You want me to give you meaning. Fine. I'll give you ash."

Rin stood and walked toward him.

"You want to follow me? Then understand this: I am not your master. I am not your savior. I am your future. A walking grave. You follow me because you think I'm powerful. But power is death, and I am running out of pieces to bury."

He pressed his hand against the boy's forehead.

Not kindly.

Not softly.

But like a brand.

"I name you Cinder."

The boy trembled.

Rin leaned in and whispered, "Because everything you once were is ash now."

That night, the cave shuddered.

Cinder dreamed of a memory that wasn't his—Rin's memory—of being buried alive, throat clogged with dirt, heartbeat slowing.

He woke screaming.

Rin didn't comfort him.

He simply said:

"Now you understand."

From then on, Cinder walked at Rin's side.

Never behind.

Never ahead.

Just... beside.

And where Rin walked, death followed.

Where Cinder walked, ash took root.

The valley did not weep.

But it remembered.

And now, it had two names to mourn.

To be continued...