Chapter 20 – The Gate of Shattered Breath
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.