Chapter 148 – Rotroot City
The scent hit before the walls came into view.
A wet, fermented stench of rotting spirit flesh, dried bloodlotus resin, and incense meant not to honor the dead—but to preserve them. Rin stood atop a hill of collapsed barkstone, peering down the broken road that snaked into the valley. Beyond a stretch of graveyard plains and rusted shrines loomed a fortress-city choked in crimson banners and fungal smoke.
Rotroot City.
Once a burial citadel belonging to the Verdant Bone Cultivators of the Eastern Repose Sect, it had been devoured by the Collapse Wars. Now it belonged to no sect, no emperor, no divine lineage. Only the merchant clans ruled here, draped in corpse-silk robes and jade teeth, trading in death like gold.
Slaves, cultivator cadavers, withered beasts of burden, ghostwood talismans, and the occasional living alchemist: all passed through Rotroot's gates, priced and weighed like salt.
Beside him, the girl known as Cinder shifted beneath her wide-brimmed mask. Her fire-burned skin remained wrapped in soot-treated bandages, and her voice had not returned since the Scorched Valley. But her silence had grown communicative. She tilted her head toward a procession of wagons heading down the valley trail—each stacked high with wrapped bodies, robed men guiding them with soulbrands stitched into their brows.
Corpse haulers.
Perfect.
Rin adjusted the tattered cart they'd stolen from a roadside ambush earlier that week, reinforcing the illusion with shattered spirit tags and bones he'd scavenged from the Gorge of Chained Lament. Yi Mu, now hidden within his Death Core, pulsed faintly with quiet awareness.
He took one last look at the horizon, where sickly red sun filtered through clouds like old blood, then descended toward the city.
The gates of Rotroot weren't guarded by soldiers.