Chapter 124 – Threshold of Suffering
There was no air in this place.
No sound, no ground. No shape to the void. Only the sensation of rawness, peeled from flesh, scraped from bone, bled from soul.
Rin floated—though there was no direction. He drifted—not because there was movement, but because there was nothing to hold him.
This was the Threshold of Suffering, not a location, but a metaphysical convergence—where agony stripped identity down to instinct and desire, where all cultivators who danced too close to death's edge must either refine... or be refined.
Rin's consciousness burned like an ember inside a hurricane of anguish. He no longer had limbs. No spine. Only the awareness of absence. The memory of pain.
And then—
A weeping face formed in the void.
Not conjured. Not summoned.
Remembered.
She appeared with hair like rivers of dusk, and eyes swollen with grief that had once been beautiful in its sincerity. Lips trembling with a love Rin had long buried beneath layers of betrayal and death. Her voice came not from her throat, but from inside Rin's marrow.
"Why didn't you save me?"