Chapter 135 – The Memory of Betrayal
The wind no longer blew. The battlefield was still. But Rin felt a pulse beneath the surface of the earth, as if something not yet dead beat beneath layers of soil, regret, and memory. A sealed rhythm. A buried will.
He had walked beyond the border of the Vale of Drowned Wills, but the terrain had not changed. Stones still whispered. Roots still wept. Above, the sky no longer followed the logic of seasons—it was a dead tapestry, grey and distant, like parchment soaked in centuries of silence.
And beneath Rin's feet, something opened.
It began not with sound, but sensation.
A heat that was not heat. A light that was not light.
His Death Core trembled—reverently, almost.
Then, like a breath exhaled from a corpse's lips, the world folded.
Rin's surroundings shattered, not in pieces, but in continuity. The battlefield melted into itself, reforming into a place that had once been, but never was—a sealed memory, stitched into the fabric of the land by an immortal will long extinguished.
He stood not in illusion, but in preserved experience.
A living memory. A divine trial.
The ground beneath him turned pristine. No blood. No rot. No corpses.