Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 146 – The Sound of Severance

The world around Rin grew quieter, but not in the way that the night hushes the earth before dawn. This was a deeper silence, one born from absence—not of sound but of essence. It was as if a thread, once taut and vibrant, was slowly unraveling, fraying beyond repair in the vast loom of his soul.

He sat alone on a fractured boulder overlooking the Blood-Eaten Vale, the wind swirling dust and faded memories across the scarred landscape. His breath came slow and deliberate, measured like a pulse steadying itself after a brutal strike. Yet within his chest, the familiar rhythm of life — his heartbeat — began to falter, to fade into a distant murmur.

Rin's eyes, sharp as shattered glass, scanned the horizon, but they no longer sought the flesh-and-blood threats that once haunted him. Instead, they searched inside, peeling back the layers of his heart, measuring the weight of what remained — and what was already gone.

The Seventh Layered Heart Technique was working.

The first fracture—Grief Severance—was spreading its deathlike frost, seeping into every sinew and shadow of his being. His emotional core, once a roaring conflagration of loss and longing, had begun to harden, to collapse into a void.

He felt it most acutely in his connection to Li Jian's soul.

Li Jian—the boy whose life had intertwined with Rin's like twin flames flickering in a tempest—was a tether Rin had never dared sever. Every breath shared, every silent promise spoken beneath the fractured skies, had forged an unbreakable bond of affection and pain.

But now.

Now that bond thinned, stretched to a fragile thread trembling on the edge of oblivion.

Rin closed his eyes, and in the void behind his eyelids, he saw Li Jian's faint outline flicker like a dying star.

No longer warm, no longer vivid.

Only a ghost whispering faint regrets.

His lips moved but no sound came. A hollow gesture, the echo of what once was.

The ritual was succeeding—not just in suppressing grief but in erasing the memory of its origin.

Not far from Rin's perch, Cinder crouched beneath a deadened ash tree, its branches skeletal and twisted like the remnants of forgotten dreams. The boy's dark eyes glittered with an unsettling curiosity as he uncovered something buried in the cracked earth.

An old, weathered flute—its lacquer chipped, faded, the mouthpiece cracked from years of disuse.

Rin's flute.

It had been lost during the chaos of their escape from the Rogue Sect's siege months ago. The instrument was a relic of a time before pain corroded his soul—a fragment of innocence now shattered beyond repair.

Cinder lifted the flute with reverence, brushing away layers of dust. His slender fingers trembled as they brought it to his lips. Tentatively, he breathed into the hollow body, coaxing a trembling note that quivered like a ghost's sigh.

Then, gathering courage, he tried to play the melody Rin once hummed unconsciously—a tune so faint and fleeting that even the wind seemed reluctant to carry it.

The sound was broken, uneven, a fragile echo of a memory lost.

Watching from the shadows, Rin's expression was unreadable. His eyes, reflecting the dying light, betrayed no recognition. The tune, once an involuntary thread woven into his being, now slipped through the cracks of his mind like water through a shattered vessel.

There was no flicker of pain or longing, no tightening of the chest.

Only cold, empty silence.

The Severance was exacting its toll.

Rin's soul was unspooling, and with each unraveling strand, the grip of his past weakened.

He no longer heard his heartbeat as the steady drum of life; it was a distant echo, like a ghost's dying pulse beneath layers of ash.

Every breath became a hollow act of survival rather than a pledge to feel.

Beneath this change, however, a different current flowed—unseen but potent.

Cinder, watching the flicker of life's remnants in Rin, began to mimic his breathing. His small chest rose and fell in careful sync with Rin's, absorbing the killing aura left in the wake of Rin's emotional death.

This silent mimicry was more than imitation—it was a transfer, a feeding.

The boy's own heart beat faster, not from fear but from a burgeoning hunger to cultivate what Rin was shedding: grief, pain, and spiritual rot.

A forbidden path, shadowed by echoes of death refinement, began to crystallize beneath the boy's flesh.

Rin rose from the boulder, the cold wind tugging at his cloak as if trying to strip away the last remnants of warmth from his body. He felt lighter, but also hollower—a vessel drained of its sacred flame.

He did not look back to the flute or to the boy who carried the shadows of his past. Not yet.

There was still much to sever. Many more layers of the heart to fracture.

And with each fracture, a deeper silence would follow—until nothing remained but the echo of a dead heart beating in the dark.

The vale swallowed his footsteps, and the sun dipped below the horizon, bleeding red into the sky.

Death was not the end.

It was only the sound of severance.

To be continued...