The winds over the bone-choked plains were heavy with the scent of decay and a strange sweetness—the rot of hope gone sour. Rin crouched behind the charred ribs of a titan beast, watching the flickering lights of the rogue encampment below. Tattered banners hung from crooked poles, inscribed with symbols half-forgotten by time: the sigil of the Pale Root Sect, shattered remnants of the Broken Vow Temple, and nameless glyphs etched in blood that pulsed faintly with residual soullight.
These were the fragments of once-great sects, now welded together by desperation and sacrilege. They had survived the divine purge only by crawling into the marrow of the world and feeding on corpses.
Rin didn't need Ny'xuan to whisper danger into his ear; the dagger at his side pulsed like a second heart, eager and aware. But he did not draw it. Not yet.
His body still bore the marks of the last trials—ashen veins from the Requiem Bloom that nestled dormant beneath his skin, and the burn of the Ravine's truth still whispering beneath his bones. He was half-mended, but fully resolved.
Tonight, he would not fight to escape.
Tonight, he would be taken.
He approached under the illusion of weakness, clutching a broken staff and bleeding from a self-inflicted wound across his ribs. His robes were torn and soiled with grave ash. He stumbled into their outer wards with the calculated tremble of someone lost, someone valuable, someone easy.
They took the bait.
Within moments, shadows surged from the dark, formed of lean cultivators with sickly skin and gleaming eyes. Chains of bone and sinew coiled around him, tightening as a woman stepped forth. Her cultivation robes were stitched with the preserved skin of children's hands.
"He bears the scent," she hissed. "The echo of the Gate."
They dragged him into the camp.
The heart of the encampment throbbed with restless energy. Black lanterns floated above the tents, lit not by flame but by soul wisps—the final thoughts of the recently dead, trapped and whispering nonsense.
Rin was lashed to a pillar of petrified flesh, its surface covered in carving channels for blood to trickle into buried jars. Around him, rogue cultivators chanted over ink-wet scrolls and jars of suspended organs. They spoke of the Gate of Deathless Bloom—an ancient passage said to allow one to die and yet not die, to shed humanity and keep power.
He listened.
They believed his body was the final vessel, the "Key of Returning," a mythological corpse that had died beyond death but had not passed through the Gate. He was their missing piece.
They were right.
But not in the way they thought.
He let them inspect him. He let them whisper and weigh and argue. One plucked hairs from his head to float in alchemical tears. Another pressed obsidian needles into his spine, tasting the twitch of death qi laced through his meridians.
He endured it all in silence.
And when they left him alone in the ritual hut, bound in stasis glyphs and sealing chains, Rin began to hum.
The song was one his mother had once sung over a cradle of bones. He didn't remember the words, but the melody ached through his soul like a fracture that had never set right. And as he hummed, the Requiem Bloom within him stirred.
It began with a single petal, unseen by all but Rin. It slid from his chest like a drop of blood too delicate to fall. It hovered.
Then another.
And another.
The hut filled with invisible flowers.
Each one bloomed from a death—a regret, a cruelty, a betrayal that had clung to flesh like mold. The souls trapped within the camp began to stir. Not the living ones, but the dead.
He fed on them.
Not with teeth.
With sorrow.
The Requiem Bloom fed on unprocessed death. On the agony of unfinished endings. On every cultivator who had used another's body to extend their life, on every child sacrificed, every name forgotten.
The camp began to tremble.
A scream tore through the night.
The monks returned to the hut, glyphs flaring.
Rin opened his eyes.
Petals drifted around him like ash. His restraints fell apart, severed by something not quite visible.
"You," one of them said, stepping back, raising a curved blade of bone. "You woke it."
"No," Rin said, voice soft.
"It's always been awake."
He raised his hand.
The Requiem Bloom unfurled.
A spiral of death-veins burst from the ground beneath him, weaving through soil and spirit. They bloomed through the bodies of the cultivators, not killing them instantly but turning their cultivation against them. Each soul burst like a seed pod, spilling essence into the air.
Their pain became his power.
Their deaths became his fuel.
Their dreams of immortality became compost.
When the sun rose, the camp was gone.
Only the pillar remained, now crowned by a tree of withered petals that bled faint light into the sky. Rin stood before it, Ny'xuan resting calmly at his hip, silent in satisfaction.
He had learned.
They had called him a vessel.
He was more than that.
He was the gatekeeper.
The Gate of Deathless Bloom wasn't a place.
It was him.
The sects that gathered here had long been exiled from the cultivation world. Not because of weakness, but because of the threat they posed to the divine order. They refused reincarnation. Refused the judgment of the heavenly cycle.
Instead, they built their power by consuming others.
Each had its own dogma:
The Broken Vow Temple believed the soul was a thread that could be knotted endlessly. By sewing many into one, they birthed "Soul-Kin," artificial immortals who collapsed after a decade of use.
The Pale Root Sect believed in parasitic cultivation, grafting their spiritual roots into the dying bodies of others, feeding on them like spiritual fungus.
The Bleeding Hymn Cult sang their own deaths into others, using echoes to prolong life in stolen flesh.
All of them feared one thing:
True death.
Rin represented it.
As Rin walked away, flames consuming the remnants behind him, he did not smile.
He had not enjoyed the slaughter.
But he had not regretted it either.
Each time he refined death, something within him silenced.
Once, he would have mourned the child whose hand-skin had formed that woman's robes.
Now, he simply remembered it.
Compassion remained, but no longer ruled him.
If all life sought to consume him—as vessel, as key, as sacrifice—then he would become unconsumable.
He would become death incarnate.
And death could not be consumed.
To be continued…