Chapter 21 – Born Without Breath
The Womb of Ending was an endless horizon of nothingness. It was not a place, nor a time. It was the space between spaces, the breath between breaths. Here, in the center of the void storm, there was no up or down, no warmth nor cold. Only the chill of eternal absence and the slow, suffocating press of entropy. Here, even light dared not tread.
Rin Xie floated, a fragment of a man, barely held together by the slivers of his will. His body was shattered—broken as if the weight of an infinite world had crushed it into dust. His soul, once bound by the fragile tether of his mortality, was now disoriented, adrift in the endless sea of nothing.
He could feel the voices of the dead. They whispered, murmured, screamed. Their memories clung to him like the weight of ancient stones, their regrets and fears swarming like a tide ready to pull him under. The faces, the voices—they were all too much. Every death he had encountered, every life he had absorbed into his Death Core, now had a presence. They weren't just memories anymore. They were a part of him, suffocating him with their sorrow, with their pain.
"I... can't lose myself here," Rin whispered to the emptiness, though his words felt like nothing more than a whisper against the roar of the void.
In his broken form, he could feel his Death Core pulsing faintly, but it was too weak. He was still half-dissolved, fractured in every sense of the word. There were no bones to speak of, no flesh to hold him together. Just a consciousness adrift, a soul fragmented like a shattered mirror, with each shard carrying the weight of a thousand deaths.
His hand moved, though it was little more than a shape without true substance. The coldness of the void clawed at him, trying to tear him apart, but there was something else here—something darker, older. It was not a memory, nor an echo. It was him.
His Death Core was the only thing that remained. It was the foundation of his existence now. Without it, he would be nothing, scattered into the void like so many whispers before him. He had ascended—yes, but this ascension was not a clean break. It had torn him apart instead, his body splintered and sundered as though it were too frail for the weight of transcendence.
The core thrummed weakly, responding to his desperation. He reached inside, pulling at it, forcing it to ignite once more. The sensation was agonizing, each pulse of power like a thousand needles piercing his soul. But he did not falter. He could not. He refused the embrace of healing; he refused to be whole again, because if he did, he would be incomplete. He would still be human, and that was a weakness he could not afford.
"No healing," Rin breathed, through gritted teeth. "I can't heal. I must remain broken."