Chapter 10 – Severing the Heart Vein
Ashes clung to Rin's skin like guilt. The fading remnants of his vision—of a world once filled with laughter, trust, and warmth—still shimmered behind his eyes, like dying embers in a dark void. But warmth no longer served him. He stood alone amidst the cold ruin of memory, where names had become tombstones and love a chain rusted with regret.
His hand, blood-crusted and trembling, gripped the hilt of the Death-Refinement Dagger. Its dark blade pulsed softly, as if sensing his hesitation—his final chain, still unbroken.
"To cultivate death, one must first bury love."
Master Li's words rang again, but they no longer felt like guidance. They felt like law—immutable, merciless. And now Rin understood. It wasn't just about sacrifice. It was about becoming something that could no longer be sacrificed.
He could not kill Xuan Lu while still clinging to the ghost of what they were.
That ghost had to die.
Rin retreated from the broken temple that had once been their master's meditation hall. He made his way deep beneath the ruins, into the catacombs that the sect had long forbidden—an ossuary of failed disciples, a resting place for those who had succumbed to inner demons, madness, or despair. The air here was thick with forgotten death, untouched for decades. This place would do.
In the dead center of the ossuary stood a broken altar made of obsidian and bone. Half-crushed skulls were fused into the black stone. A ritual circle had long ago been carved into the ground—faded, but intact. Rin knelt before it, spreading his blood across the grooves with deliberate reverence.
The Ritual of Severance—a forbidden rite, one that only the most fanatical death cultivators dared attempt. It was said to unmake the heart vein: the spiritual root that linked a cultivator to their capacity for compassion, love, and empathy. A final cut that allowed them to walk the Death Dao unbound.
There was no going back.
Rin opened the Death-Refinement Dagger, its blade splitting open with a sickening hiss, revealing runes carved inside the metal. They writhed with necrotic essence, ancient and hungry. He bit into his left hand, letting his blood drip onto the dagger, then pressed it into the center of the ritual.