Chapter 147 – Spirits That Beg for Chains
The wind did not howl in the Gorge of Chained Lament.
It whimpered.
It crawled across the stone like dying breath clawing from split throats, dragging behind it the spectral weight of countless unseen mouths. Rin stood at the precipice, his shadow bent and thin in the waning, ashen light of a cracked sky. The gorge stretched for miles, a jagged wound in the earth flanked by obsidian ridges shaped like screaming faces, as though the land itself had once wept and then hardened into despair.
This was where forgotten spirits came to scream for captivity.
Not for release. Not for vengeance.
But for chains.
The gorge had no true name, not in any scroll or map, but in the whispered records of soulbound cultivators, it was called Cradle of the Unbound Dead—a cursed gorge that birthed nothing but fear. They said the void beneath it was endless, deeper than even the Primordial Graves that predated the Heavens themselves. A place where the concept of death unraveled into something worse.
Rin's robes fluttered with the wind, layered in ragged black and blood-kissed silk, now stitched with the remains of the resurrection sect's robes and ash-veined bark from the Scorched Valley. His Death Core pulsed coldly in his chest. Here, it hummed with particular sharpness—like a creature that recognized kin. Or prey.
He stepped forward, stone cracking beneath his boot, and the gorge answered.
A whisper—no, a thousand whispering voices laced with hunger—rose from the depths.
"Bind me. Please. Bind me. Let me forget. Let me forget the dark..."