Chapter 137 — To Use the Living and the Dead
The cold light of dawn seeped faintly through the jagged cracks of the ancient cavern, casting fractured shards of pale gold across the labyrinthine chamber. The air was thick with dust and the metallic tang of old blood. Silence hung heavy here, like a living shroud—waiting, watching, breathing. This place had never known life; only death had sculpted its stone bones.
At the cavern's center, Rin sat cross-legged before an altar of cracked bones, fractured teeth, and faded ash—remnants of forgotten corpses that time had all but devoured. The altar was a dark sanctum carved from granite veined with red streaks like dried blood. Around him, the faint murmur of a sealed soul echoed—a presence trapped in chains forged from spiritual iron and sorrows unshed.
Li Jian's soul.
A flicker of cold fire danced in Rin's eyes as he reached out, hands trembling not from fear or weakness, but from the brittle weight of inevitability. He was no longer the boy who had once felt the sting of grief in his marrow. That child was buried beneath layers of iron will and sharpened hatred. The corpse-rooted blade he sought to forge would be the final crucible of his pain and calculation.
"Bones. Ashes. And a soul chained in quiet torment," Rin murmured, his voice low and resolute. "From these, I will birth the edge of my will."
He grasped the brittle bone fragments, cracked ribs stained with age and cruelty, and began weaving them with strands of his own death qi—black as a starless void, cold as the grave. The death qi was not mere energy; it was distilled inevitability, a manifestation of the universe's cruel finality. With it, Rin bound the bones together, molding them into a jagged shape, sharp yet uneven—wild and primal like the roots of a dead tree that clawed desperately at the earth.
These bones were not simply bones; each carried the imprint of the lives once contained within, souls that had been shattered or crushed under the weight of fate. Some were from war-torn battlegrounds, others from abandoned villages consumed by famine and plague. Each fragment pulsed faintly, as if whispering the last breath of a life now extinguished.
But this weapon—this blade—was not to be forged of death alone.
Rin scattered a handful of gray-white ashes into the crucible of his forging circle, the ashes of those who had been reduced to nothing but memory and dust. The ash was weightless, drifting like silent snow over the dark stone. When the ashes met the black death qi and the tangled bones, a faint, eerie glow spread across the blade's forming silhouette.