Chapter 128 – Flesh-Thread Puppets
The Forest of Withered Throats whispered like a butcher's lullaby.
Its trees grew in bent spirals, bark peeled and stitched with string, their roots tangled with the ribs of forgotten beasts. The mist that coiled through the air was not moisture, but the breath of once-living lungs crushed into vapor and ritual smoke. No birds sang here. Only the click of bone-thread wind chimes hanging from hollowed branches.
Rin stepped into the forest with a calm forged from silence.
Behind him, the death-flame of his Ego still flickered—a residual echo from the Heaven-Hating Scripture fragment. His core no longer pulsed with simple death. It now throbbed with intentional absence, hollow yet honed, as if he carried within him the shape of a grave yet to be dug.
The deeper he walked, the louder the forest became—not with sound, but with wrongness. There were no corpses here, yet the air reeked of flesh turned inside out.
The rogue sect called themselves the Threadbound Choir.
They did not sing.
They stitched.
It began with murmurs in the villages Rin passed—tales of kin returning from death, hollow-eyed and whispering lullabies they'd never known in life. Of fathers rebuilt with crooked limbs and wives reborn with too many fingers. These constructs wandered only at dusk, carrying offerings of bone-powder incense to unknown masters.
The Threadbound Choir had no known origin sect, no recorded patriarchs, no immortal ancestors. They were an absence in the annals, a cancer in the corners of the world. What little Rin uncovered spoke of a technique older than any cultivation path—a forbidden synthesis of memory and marrow.
The flesh puppets were not corpses. They were replicas.