Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 157: The Immortal’s Message

The sky was not quiet.

Even in this hidden gorge beneath the Deadwind Spine, where no sunlight reached and even the wind feared to whisper, Rin Xie felt the tremble of divine intention pulsing through the heavens above.

It beat in the distance like a war drum wrapped in velvet—too faint for mortals to sense, but to him, it was deafening.

He stood over a man half-buried in mud and blood. A rogue cultivator whose name he would never learn. The man had been dragged by the tides of fate into a storm meant for gods.

And now he served his final purpose.

"Take it..." the man rasped. His mouth was dry, teeth cracked from internal backlash. His meridians had already collapsed—the price of resisting something he never understood.

Rin knelt, silent.

The cultivator's trembling hand held out a jade slip. Not common—this was Heaven-carved, etched in a script older than written time. The jade itself pulsed faintly with a breath not its own.

Rin reached for it.

The cultivator shivered, blood foaming from his lips. His eyes turned upward—not to Rin, but to something beyond.

"I didn't read it," the man whispered, voice splintered like a dying fire. "Didn't want to see what they say about you..."

Then his chest stilled.

No grand death. No fanfare. Just stillness. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com

A candle, spent.

Rin stood.

The gorge was silent again.

And in his hand pulsed the decree.

He activated the jade slip.

Light surged—not brilliant, but hollow, as if the heavens themselves wept through it.

A voice followed.

It was not loud.

But it did not need to be.

"Divine Writ 917-Zeta, Final Revision.

Subject: Xie Rin.

Classification: Defiler of Heaven's Cycle, Bearer of the Hollow Flame, Refiner of Death.

Status: Anathema.

Decree: Termination."

"By decree of the Celestial Vault, by command of the Ten Thousand Heavens, and by silence of the Immortal Monarch Who Speaks Not:

Let this soul be hunted across realms.

Let his breath be annulled.

Let all who shelter him be marked."

"This one is forbidden. His existence is a contagion. His path—extinction."

The jade shattered.

The pieces dissolved midair, returning to the cycle that had judged him.

And Rin stood alone beneath the gorge, his silence louder than ever.

So. It was official now.

Not merely a mistake. Not a fluctuation. Not a hidden sin waiting to be noticed.

He had been seen.

And Heaven itself had recoiled.

For a moment, he did nothing.

His eyes trailed upward, through the jagged cleft of rock above. Through miles of stone and cloud and void, where somewhere far above sat gods who had never bled, decreeing death upon those who had only ever survived.

It was not rage that filled him.

It was confirmation.

He had known since the Gate of Shattered Breath. When lightning refused to fall. When divine will recoiled from his soul.

He had suspected it in the Realm of Bleeding Heaven, when pain refused to end, yet healing was taboo.

He had felt it when Mei Lian's name disappeared from the Book of Rebirth.

He was not just unwanted.

He was a mistake.

Then he laughed.

Not loudly. Not bitterly. Just once.

Short. Controlled. Like a monk ringing a bell at the start of slaughter.

"Then let them hunt me," he murmured.

But they would not find him.

His first step was the severing.

Rin sat beneath the gorge, blood drawn into a shallow pool around him. He etched the Hex of Hollow Breath across his limbs, into his flesh—not written with ink, but with intent.

Death Qi swirled.

But this was not the vibrant flame of battle, nor the cold rot of tombs.

This was unbeing.

A death cultivated not to destroy, but to erase.

He invoked the ancient principles of Void-Wind Reversal and Nameless Bone Sutra—forbidden arts left behind by the extinct Sect of Nullifiers. Techniques that once hid entire cities from divine sight until the day the Heavens collapsed them in fury.

Rin's cultivation base was too unique for their forms to apply cleanly.

So he adapted them.

Where they used emptiness, he used memory.

Where they used silence, he used forgotten grief.

His Death Core began to spiral. The Hollow Flame within his chest dimmed—not extinguished, but concealed. Each flicker folded inward, sealed by layers of Death Masking Veils.

Then, slowly, he reached into his own soul.

And plucked his name free.

Not in the mortal sense. Names could be changed.

But the signature of spirit, the breathprint encoded in every cultivator's qi—he severed it.

A surgical, agonizing process.

His body spasmed. He vomited black blood. His vision fractured into nine deaths, each one a life he might have lived.

But when it was done—

He did not exist.

Not to the world.

Not to the Heavens.

Not to the memory of fate.

Even the gorge around him forgot he had ever been there. The blood dried, the echoes faded. His scent, his pressure, his karmic weight—gone.

He rose.

And the gorge remained still.

Rin flexed his fingers. His soul felt thinner, yes—but sharper. The kind of sharpness that cuts between worlds, not through them.

From now on, every breath he took would be a lie.

Every step he walked would leave no trace.

And yet—he would not hide.

He would move.

Through realms. Through divine barriers. Through systems too rigid to account for something that refused to exist.

The Heaven's Defiler had vanished from the records.

But he was still here.

Watching.

Learning.

Becoming.

Later, beneath a dying sun in the next province over, a traveling cultivator paused.

He sniffed the air.

"Strange," he muttered. "There's... nothing here. No qi. No death. No life."

His companion frowned. "Maybe it's a void storm."

"No," the man said, shivering. "It's worse."

Somewhere nearby, Rin walked unseen.

And above, in the Celestial Vault, a divine scribe dipped their brush in fate-ink and frowned.

"...Strange," they murmured. "The Defiler's thread has vanished."

The ink refused to mark.

The scroll grew cold.

And a whisper stirred among the divine.

"We have lost him."

Rin smiled beneath his mask of absence.

His first war had begun.

Not with blades.

But with disappearance.

To be continued...