Chapter 121 — The Rootless Grave
The cold wind bit through the shattered walls of the ruins like a blade, whispering ancient laments of forgotten lives. Once a thriving sect that dared to defy the heavens, the grounds were now nothing but shattered stones and hollow echoes. The celestial purge had left no mercy for those who challenged the natural order, their legacies erased, their names lost beneath ash and ruin.
Rin crouched at the edge of a newly revealed crevice, a narrow fissure torn open by the restless earth. His Death Core thrummed faintly in his chest, an ominous pulse that urged caution. Around him, the remnants of the forsaken sect lay strewn — broken relics, faded banners, and the brittle bones of cultivators who had fought a hopeless war against fate itself.
The air smelled of damp earth and decay, but beneath that was something else — a faint scent of jade, like crushed stones long buried. His fingers brushed aside rubble until they found a carved stone slab, worn smooth by centuries yet still etched with the faint outlines of ancient runes. A tomb.
The slab shifted with effort, revealing a narrow stair descending deep below the ruins. Darkness beckoned, swallowed by the scent of old death and forgotten defiance.
Rin's heart, cold and numbed by countless betrayals and deaths, felt a whisper of something else — a flicker of reverence. He descended.
The tomb was vast, a subterranean crypt carved from bedrock, its walls lined with niches housing the skeletal remains of cultivators — men, women, elders, and children alike. Each skeleton was accompanied by a jade core, cracked, shattered, or in some cases, missing altogether.
The walls were etched with countless names and dates, a ledger of the sect's fallen. But these were no ordinary records. They were chronicles of failure, of defiance crushed beneath the unyielding hand of heaven.
The more Rin read, the clearer the story became. These cultivators had sought to sever their bonds to mortality by unorthodox means—using forbidden death refinement techniques, weaving death qi in ways that twisted their fates. They had hoped to transcend, but instead, they had become relics in this rootless grave.
Among the niches, something caught Rin's eye — a small, child-sized skeleton clutching an empty jade core, its fingers frozen in a grasp that reached for something lost. The child's name, faintly carved on the stone above, was smudged almost beyond recognition, but enough remained: Ling'er.