Chapter 154: The Gravedigger’s Sect
"That which feeds on the dead must one day hunger for itself."
The soil breathed beneath his feet.
Rin Xie stood upon the rim of a sunken vale—no birds, no wind, no sky. Just a ceiling of calcified roots and a thin mist rising like breath from the earth. The moon was absent here, devoured by layers of forgotten sediment. Even his own shadow felt hesitant to follow.
He had come chasing a rumor. A string of vanishing rogue cultivators, disappearing without a trace in the Death-Soaked Marshlands. A whisper on the lips of a corpse he had pulled from a tree. The clue had led here: a valley that exhaled rot and hummed with subterranean Qi—death-stilled, stagnant, and suffocating.
And yet, something pulsed beneath.
Rin's Death Core burned in his chest like a starving flame. Here, death didn't just linger. It fermented.
He took a step forward.
The Gravedigger's Sect was already watching.
They rose from the mire like statues emerging from memory. Robes stitched from burial shrouds, their faces obscured by death masks carved of polished thighbone. Each figure held a crooked spade etched with runes—tools of cultivation, weapons of extraction. Soul-harvesters, bone-bleeders, flesh-weighers.
A dozen surrounded him, and yet none attacked.
The leader stepped forward. Taller than the others, his death mask bore six eye-sockets—three on each side—and within each socket, a dying flame pulsed. His Qi was oppressive, not in volume but in finality. He was not powerful because he defied death.