Chapter 140 — Death Craves Justice
The broken mountain basin was a wound upon the land—jagged and raw, a scar carved by endless conflict. Thunderclouds bled shadows onto shattered stones, casting the battlefield into twilight even before dusk could arrive. Here, the rogue sect's war games unfolded like a cruel pantomime, but the stakes were real, soaked in the bitter red of blood and despair.
The air was thick with the stench of sweat and rotting flesh, a suffocating miasma that clung to Rin's skin like a curse. Around him, the fractured factions of the rogue sect tore at one another with savage desperation, their unity long dissolved into bitter ambition and fractured loyalty. The mountain echoed with war cries and the hollow clatter of broken bones.
But Rin was not here to watch.
He moved with the inevitability of dusk swallowing day—a shadow bleeding into the chaos, unseen until the moment his presence ripped through the very fabric of the battleground. The Corpse-Rooted Blade hung at his side, a twisted amalgam of bone, ash, and a soul shackled within its core. It breathed with a sinister life of its own, pulsating in resonance with the dark void nestled inside Rin's chest.
A single step forward shattered the fragile equilibrium. The war games froze, a hundred sets of eyes turning, wide with dread and disbelief, towards the unmasked figure who had shed invisibility like a second skin.
The silence that followed was a shroud.
The blade sang—a low, guttural hymn of decay and reclamation. It was not mere metal; it was an artifact forged in agony, bound to the souls it consumed and the emotions Rin buried deep within himself. The sealed spirit of Li Jian, imprisoned within, stirred with a twisted delight, a grim symphony playing in resonance with the carnage to come.
Rin gripped the hilt. The blade thirsted.
With a slash that split the stale air, death erupted.