Chapter 143 – A Duel Where Pain Speaks Louder
The Screaming Graveyard did not whisper.
It howled.
It was not a place but a wound carved into the world's memory, a valley swallowed whole by a war no history dared record. The soil was blackened, not by fire, but by sorrow; each grain of dirt had once drunk the blood of someone who screamed in agony, betrayal, or both. Above, the sky was not sky, but a dome of petrified lungs—each one eternally gasping, the silence between gasps tighter than death itself. Beneath, every step Rin took released voices not his own—cries of murdered mothers, sons calling for gods who never came, lovers whose names had been forgotten.
Rin Xie stood at the heart of this grave, blade unsheathed. Not Ny'xuan—she slept. This was a lesser blade, forged of shadow-iron, one that could only cut if gripped with memory.
His opponent was no ordinary rogue cultivator, but a Law-Bound Duelist of the Bone Thrones, wielding a Deathstaff carved from the marrow of a saint who had lived in agony for three hundred years. His skin was tattooed with inverted scripture. His name was gone—given up to the graveyard to gain entrance. In this place, only pain spoke. And Rin was about to scream.
"Do you know the rules, deathchild?" the Duelist intoned, voice buzzing with insectile rot. "Here, you do not kill with power. You kill with loss. Every strike you make must be sharpened with grief. If you swing without mourning, your weapon will crumble. Pain must speak, or you will fall."
Rin nodded.
He knew.
The graveyard accepted no lies. No hollow emotions. It would tear apart any illusion not built on the bedrock of authentic sorrow.
The Duelist struck first—fast as the cracking of a memory long repressed. His staff screamed as it cut the air, trailing ribbons of regret. It struck Rin's blade—and Rin remembered.
He remembered a boy with cracked fingers and frostbitten lips, starving outside the Azure Echo Sect's gates, begging for entrance. That boy had been him.