Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 151: The Price of a Pulse

From stillness, I carved a heartbeat. And it carved me in return.

The sky above the Bleeding Heaven did not move. It wept bloodless clouds that hung like corpses strung from invisible nooses, swaying slightly, yet never falling. The sun—a pale wound in the heavens—offered no warmth. And beneath it, amidst half-dead fields and bone-dry rice paddies, Rin Xie stood at the edge of a breathless silence.

The village had no name.

It had forgotten how to speak it.

Wooden huts leaned inward like grieving mothers. Smoke curled from no fires. Trees bore barkless trunks, as if they had shed their skin in shame. The wind carried nothing—no birds, no laughter, not even the scratch of insects. Only the whisper of breath on the verge of vanishing.

And inside the largest hut, a mother wept without tears.

Rin stood over the child's corpse, his hand unmoving, his eyes locked on the still chest. The boy's skin had already begun to bruise at the joints. Mouth parted, fingers curled. His spirit had departed two breaths ago, swallowed by the Realm's lingering curse of undying death—a paradox he now dared to unravel.

"Are you a god?" the mother whispered.

Her voice trembled against the dirt floor like a prayer abandoned halfway through. She didn't bow. She didn't plead. She simply looked at Rin with the empty resignation of someone who had seen the divine, and still been left behind.

"I'm not a god," Rin answered, kneeling beside the boy. "I'm what's left after the gods have gone."

The boy's name was Sen. His body, frail and malformed, barely clung to the shape of a soul. But Rin saw the thread—thin as regret, fraying at the edge of the void. It hadn't fully severed yet.

Not yet.

He removed his outer robe and traced a sigil in the air with one hand, his fingers dragging trails of black mist—Refined Death Qi. It hissed and curled, drawn from his core, shaped by experience, bound by pain.

This was not the first time he had watched someone die.

But this was the first time he dared to reverse it.

He placed his fingers gently upon the boy's sternum. Cold. Rigid. Still.

Then, he exhaled.

And with that breath, he unraveled a part of himself.

Death Qi: Return to Origin.

A black lotus bloomed beneath the boy's chest, invisible to mortal eyes but vibrant in the spectral realm. The petals trembled, pulling in the ambient decay around them. It consumed the silence, drank the finality, and fed it back in reverse.

Sen gasped.

The mother screamed.

His chest convulsed, once. A heartbeat like a thunderclap cracked the silence. Color returned to his cheeks, redder than they had ever been in life. But Rin's hand trembled.

His nails turned black.

His veins dimmed.

He staggered backward, coughing into his palm—dark ichor. Not blood, not Qi, but something more primal. Something personal. He had given the boy a heartbeat.

And in return, it had stolen one from him.

A Hundred Heartbeats Later

Night fell like a punishment.

The villagers did not celebrate the child's revival. They feared it.

They called Rin "The End-Walker," and in hushed tones, "the Reverse Ghost."

He sat alone beneath a dead tree at the edge of the village, legs crossed, eyes closed, body decaying from within. His cultivation core burned cold—not from backlash, but from consumption. Each breath was heavier now. Every heartbeat sounded not like a pulse, but a countdown.

To restore life was not a power.

It was a transaction.

"What you gave," came a voice, "was not yours to give."

Rin opened his eyes.

A man stood at the path, wearing robes embroidered with silken bone motifs—the mark of the Qin'xu Bone-Spire Clan, a minor but devout cultivator family from the northern ravines. He held no weapon, but his spiritual pressure pulsed with ritualistic authority.

Rin did not rise.

"You saw the revival?" Rin asked flatly.

The cultivator stepped closer. "We felt it. The heavens recoiled. The Writ of the Deathless Law shook."

"The child was not meant to die."

The man's expression hardened. "No one is meant to die. But that is precisely what makes death sacred."

Rin didn't reply. He didn't have to. The man continued, stepping into the moonlight.

"You've desecrated the Mandate. Restoring life is the domain of Immortals, and even they dare not do it lightly. You—you, a mere fledgling of death, used it to pull a mortal back from the Vein of Ending."

Rin's fingers curled. He could feel his bones protesting. His Death Core trembled, not from fear, but from imbalance.

The revived life still clung to him. A tether between him and Sen.

"You're not here to debate," Rin said. "You're here to kill me."

The cultivator tilted his head. "Not personally. But I've sent word to the Wandering Executor Sect. The bounty has already been issued. Fifty thousand spirit coins. A vial of soul lotus nectar. One minor Heavenly Token."

Silence.

Then laughter—cold and fraying.

Rin stood.

"Fifty thousand?" he whispered. "They've underpriced me."

As dawn bled across the sky like an opened vein, Rin walked away from the village.

The mother did not say thank you.

Sen did not remember him.

It was better that way.

The path twisted through fields of petrified wheat and crumbled statues—villagers who had once tried to cultivate beyond their means. The land remembered death well. Rin could hear it whispering beneath the soil, old echoes clinging to the marrow of the Realm.

He staggered briefly, leaning against a jagged stone.

His reflection shimmered in a puddle of stagnant water. freёweɓnovel.com

One eye had begun to cloud.

His tongue tasted of grave ash.

And a second heartbeat pulsed within him—foreign, borrowed.

Sen's life had not fully separated from him. The act of revival had created a bond. Rin had not merely returned life.

He had anchored it within his own core.

That meant every breath the boy took shaved away a sliver of Rin's foundation.

So this is the price, he thought.

Not energy.

Not Qi.

But self.

To reverse death was not an act of power. It was an act of transference. You gave yourself into the corpse, and if you were lucky, they rose.

If not, you died instead.

Further North – The Bone-Spire's Judgment Hall

Elder Qin Mo knelt before a blood-forged altar, his hands soaked in ceremonial ichor.

"The abomination lives," he whispered.

A dozen ghost-bone lanterns flared.

From within the altar, a voice rasped—cold, feminine, without breath.

"Then let him die. Send the White Pythons. Send the Hollow-Flesh Paladins. Send whoever still believes death is not to be bought."

Qin Mo rose.

And far above, a thousand-eyed raven shrieked into the air, carrying with it the seal of vengeance.

He sat beneath a tree whose roots curled like fingers desperate for soil.

He meditated.

He watched the pulse of Sen's life shimmer faintly inside him.

He reached into his own core—and saw rot.

A necrotic seed had been planted there. A karma not from killing, but from saving.

"Life is heavier than death," he murmured. "It drags everything down with it."

He wrapped his fingers around a knife carved from a silencing wyrm's fang.

"Next time," he whispered, "I'll kill more carefully."

And with that, he carved out the pulse. Not from the boy, but from himself—isolating the tether, caging it within a lotus sigil, anchoring it to an artifact.

Sen would live.

But Rin would no longer pay for it.

The child's pulse, now self-sustaining, drifted free like a seed on wind.

And Rin Xie stood again—less than before, but sharper.

To be continued...