Chapter 131 – Voices of the Rotten Sect
The corpse reeked of spoiled marrow.
Rin knelt by the bloated body of the Bonewind Cult disciple, his hands silent and reverent, moving like a mortician's as he peeled back the torn robes and sank his fingers into the soft rot beneath the man's navel. The Bonewind sigil—two spiraled femurs threaded through a wind-knot glyph—had melted into the flesh, branding not just the skin but the very bone, etched by death-aspected qi.
The disciple had died from spiritual collapse, not battle. His core had corroded from within, overfed on necrotic qi that spiraled too quickly for his meridians to process.
A fitting death for a Bonewind rat.
Rin carved out the spiritual core, a sludgy pearl of half-digested death essence, and pressed it to his own chest. The Grief Reclamation mark pulsed once over his heart—an echo of suffering not his own—but he quelled the surge of sorrow.
This wasn't about grief. This was strategy.
He didn't absorb the core. Not yet. He would wear it.
Beneath the ashwood canopy, where fungal roots slithered through bone-studded soil and rotten talismans flapped in windless air, Rin draped the corpse's face over his own—masking it with a death technique learned in the Vale of Hollow Bones. Tendrils of refined death qi twisted around his limbs, reshaping muscle tone, aura, and scent until even a soul-vision cultivator would struggle to perceive the difference.
He became Deathroot Jian, a mid-tier Bonewind disciple who had died whispering prayers to a rotting god.
The Bonewind Cult, a shattered fragment of a once-greater necrosect, lingered in the crevices of a dying mountain range known as Gravemoss Ridge. Its disciples fed on decomposition. Their cultivation method demanded they cannibalize the spiritual cores of those who had been dead no less than seven days and no more than thirteen—past that, the rot surpassed stability; sooner, and the soul remnants would still scream.
Inside the cult's winding catacombs—walls lined with cages of half-dead beasts and spiritual cadavers strung upside down to "ripen"—Rin found his place.