Chapter 123 – The Bone-Eating Sect
The wind howled across the hollow plateau, dragging with it the scent of blood and rot. The stone beneath Rin's feet pulsed faintly—as if it remembered the agony it had soaked up over centuries. Cracks in the earth exposed marrow-colored stone, veined with calcified essence, and bones—tens of thousands—formed a mosaic that spiraled inward toward a sunken ziggurat in the distance.
There were no birds here. No insects. Even the wind carried silence with it, as though afraid to disturb the appetites of the dead.
Rin stepped forward, the aftermath of the tomb duel still simmering in his bones. His Death Core pulsed with a slow rhythm, digesting the last of the skeletal elder's soul-fragments and refining them into pure intent. Soul Flare lingered in his chest, an ember that whispered of grief sharpened into annihilation.
He did not sense the ambush. Not in time.
The marrow-veined ground split beneath him.
A chain erupted from the earth, barbed with hooked bone, and wrapped around his leg before he could react. Another burst upward, spearing into his shoulder. His Death Core flared instinctively, but the chains drank in his death-qi greedily, feasting on it like starved leeches.
Dozens of figures emerged from the ground like carrion phantoms.
They wore robes stitched from skin, dyed yellow with fat and blackened by soot. Their eyes gleamed like rotting pearls, and every one of them reeked of boiled marrow and spiritual corrosion. At their head stood a gaunt man, half his face a polished skull. He held a ladle of bone in one hand, and a brazier of steaming marrow in the other.
"We greet the bearer of the Death Bone Relic."
His voice was thin, rasping, yet each word cracked with ritualistic force. The figures around him hissed and prostrated themselves.
Rin fought against the chains, but they coiled tighter, tearing at flesh and soul both. A fragment of Soul Flare surged to the surface, but was immediately smothered by the marrow-bound sigils that crawled along the chains like living worms.