The air in the final ruin of the Mortal Realm was thick with the scent of ruin and old blood. The remnants of forgotten gods, their essence crushed beneath the weight of time, scattered like ash across the crumbled earth. Broken stone pillars, half-buried in the sand, spoke of an age long past. This place had not seen light for millennia, and even the wind had forgotten its name.
Rin Xie stood at the center of it. Around him, the ashes of his journey—the places he had walked, the people he had met, and the deaths he had cultivated—gathered into one singular, boundless offering.
The final test.
He had come to this place by no will but his own. The Gate of Shattered Breath, an Ancestral Portal, was buried beneath the ruin, forged eons ago, before the heavens twisted the cycle of reincarnation. The gate had once been a doorway for mortals to ascend beyond death, to cross into the unknown realms where the gods dared not tread. But now, it was little more than a broken monument to hubris.
The very fabric of the world trembled around him, as if the earth itself knew that something had come to claim it—something that was neither living nor dead.
Rin had walked this path alone, each step burdened with the weight of countless souls, their regrets, their pain, and their broken aspirations. Every person he had met on his journey, every piece of suffering he had absorbed, was now part of him. It was not a power to be wielded—it was a transformation, a becoming.
Death.
He had become death itself, not in the way others had imagined, as a singular, inevitable end, but as something far more dangerous. Rin had learned to shape death. Refine it. And now, as the last remnants of mortality clung to his form, he would enter this portal—not as a seeker, but as the one who would redefine what it meant to transcend.
Rin had gathered the pieces of his past like a craftsman assembling his tools. From the Vale of Hollow Bones, he took the ashes of grief. From the plague-ridden village, he collected the wails of the forgotten dead. From the Silent Caverns, he brought the blood of silence, the essence of absence.
He stood before the shattered gate, fingers trembling as he reached into the deep core of his Death Sigil. The sigil was no mere symbol—it was the culmination of everything he had cultivated: the sorrow of the dead, the regrets of the living, the pain of his own soul. He pressed it to the earth, and with his own blood, he began to draw the sigil in the sand.
Each stroke of the sigil burned the ground beneath him. The symbols, ancient and twisted, wriggled like living things, feeding off the energy around them. Blood, sorrow, regret, and silence bled into the sigil, coalescing into a living force. The earth around Rin cracked, as though the very foundations of the world were recoiling from the power he had summoned.
A low hum rose from the gate.
It awoke.
Rin stepped back, watching with unblinking eyes as the Ancestral Portal began to stir. The sky above rippled, and the winds grew still. The gate, once a thing of stone and dust, seemed to breathe, its edges crumbling away like flesh from bone. It was a thing of pure entropy, a doorway that existed outside the flow of time, held together by the very forces that had once been beyond mortal understanding.
And then, just as he had done countless times before, Rin did what he was born to do.
He stepped through.
The moment his foot crossed the threshold, the heavens took notice. They had seen his rise, his refusal to conform to their laws. He was not supposed to be here. He was not supposed to be anything but a fleeting memory, a broken spirit. But Rin Xie had defied them at every turn, and now they would punish him.
A great roar of divine fury shattered the air, and a presence, vast and all-consuming, descended upon him.
A divine will.
It wrapped around Rin like a storm, crushing his body, drowning his soul in a sea of righteousness and retribution. It was not a voice that spoke to him—no, it was a command that raked at the very core of his being.
"You defy the heavens. You are not meant to transcend. Your death will never find peace."
The words were not spoken in sound. They were felt, deep within Rin's soul. The heavens had sent their wrath in the form of an all-encompassing curse, a divine condemnation that would forever stain his existence.
But Rin did not fear. He had never feared.
His Death Core pulsed with a fierce intensity, the Crimson Eclipse flame igniting in his chest, rising to meet the divine will. The divine force sought to smite him, to burn away his very essence, but Rin stood unyielding. His body shattered, his flesh torn apart, his soul raked with the fire of the heavens—but his core endured. The sigil he had drawn on the earth blazed, now filled with the infinite death that had coursed through his veins, and the portal responded.
It was not Rin that shattered.
It was the heavens that faltered.
The divine will recoiled, its power unable to break the seal that Rin had placed upon himself. In that moment, the gate widened.
Rin's body began to break apart, piece by piece, as though the very fabric of his existence could no longer withstand the forces pressing against it. His soul screamed in agony, but still, he pressed forward.
His legs buckled beneath him as his physical form disintegrated, the pain unbearable. But in the agony, Rin saw something else—a vision, a flicker of the future. In that moment, he glimpsed what lay beyond the gates.
A figure standing alone atop the heavens.
The form was his. There was no doubt. But it was a version of him that was no longer human. His skin was scorched, his eyes voids of infinite sorrow. He was no longer Rin Xie, the boy who had once been buried alive.
He was death itself.
And then, the gates opened fully. Rin's body shattered completely, his flesh, bones, and soul caught in the pull of the portal. He was torn apart, every part of him cast into the depths of that dark abyss.
But in the fragments of his dying self, he did not fear. He had long since become what he was always meant to be.
The divine will fell silent as Rin's last cry was swallowed by the gate. There would be no rebirth, no immortality to hold him back.
Rin had transcended.
Not by escaping death.
But by becoming it.
To be continued…