Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 142 – The Corpse General’s Smile

The Valley of Withered Harmonies was never meant to be heard. Its winds howled in disharmony—flute notes choked with bone dust, symphonic hums twisted into war cries. Old banners from fallen sects draped the cliffside like the skins of forgotten giants. They fluttered in phantom gusts, soaked in Qi-blood and memory. Rin Xie stepped into this sacrilege without hesitation. Cinder followed, barefoot and silent, leaving ash in his wake.

At the heart of the valley stood a dais of polished vertebrae—a throne constructed from the spinal columns of slain sect leaders, mortared together by soul-marrow. Atop it sat a man draped in ceremonial decay, robes embroidered with prayers in reverse-script. His face, waxen and drawn tight over bone, resembled a statue more than flesh. Hollow eyes sat deep in shadowed sockets, like twin graves that had forgotten what light was. But when they turned upon Rin, they glimmered with something worse than recognition: remembrance.

"You have returned," the Corpse General said, voice like incense smoke curling over a charnel pit—sweet, cloying, and tainted. "Rin Xie, unburied child of the Azure Echo Sect. Do you remember the bloom I gave you?"

Rin did not answer immediately. His breath misted the air, despite no cold. The Death Qi coiled at his core pulsed, resonating with the spiritual entropy of this place. He remembered. Of course he did.

A withered garden beneath the starlight. Seven years old. Small hands stained with ink from calligraphy lessons he hadn't understood. A man with bright eyes and a softer face then, kneeling, offering him a single petal-blooming Spirit Blossom—a rare flower whose petals could reflect one's soul. "For your first cultivation thought," the elder had said. "May it echo in harmony."

"I pressed it into my scripture book," Rin said now, tone level. "But it rotted the pages."

A grin stretched across the Corpse General's face—too wide, too dry. It cracked the skin at the corners, but he didn't bleed. "As all things must. Even scripture. Especially harmony. Pain, child. Pain is the only thing that endures."

Rin stepped forward, boots crushing bone fragments into the sacred soil. "You were the Azure Echo Sect's Elder Harmonist. You taught suffering was to be transcended." He paused. "Now you wear it like armor."

The Corpse General stood. He did not walk; his bones rearranged, unfolding like a mantis stretching its limbs after centuries in a coffin. Runes pulsed across his skeletal frame—sigils of the Bone Thrones, the rogue pantheon of death-cultivators who ascended by embracing spiritual rot. Behind him, seven thrones stood in a semi-circle—each occupied by husks, once men, now vessels of Law-Warped Death. Their eyes wept blood. Their mouths murmured mantras about the pleasure of agony, the sweetness of decay.

"I offer you a seat among them," the Corpse General said, lifting a hand that held nothing but ruin. "Your Death Core sings. You are one of us. Leave behind the lie of resistance. Sit. Rule. Rot."

Rin stared at the Bone Thrones. The air around them trembled. They weren't just chairs; they were contracts—seats infused with Heaven-cursed pacts that granted power in exchange for the surrender of all purpose but pain. Cultivators who sat became embodiments of Suffering Law, immortal and mad.

"I refine death," Rin said. "Not wear it."

"You refine pain," the Corpse General corrected. "Because you fear it owns you. Let it. Let it speak through you, as it does me. I once believed as you did. Then I was betrayed. I watched my disciples die for sect principles that meant nothing in the end. I wept until I laughed."

The world quieted. Even the wind stopped screaming.

Rin walked to the edge of the dais and drew a circle into the bone-floor with a line of his own blood.

"This is not a conversation. This is a ritual," he said. "I invoke Law Duel by Death Understanding."

Gasps from the Bone Thrones. One of the husks began to wail.

The Corpse General tilted his head, grinning wider. "You remember the rites. Brave. Foolish. The cost is eternal."

"Only the one who truly understands suffering may walk away," Rin recited.

"So it shall be," the Corpse General said.

They stepped into the circle. A sigil of ancient law, older than sects, older than realms, carved itself into existence beneath their feet. Reality bent—not with power, but with meaning. The duel was not of fists or Qi.

It was of pain.

Not just endurance.

Interpretation.

The world fell away.

Suddenly, they stood in the Mirror Grave—a Death Law domain forged by the ritual's activation. A plane of mirrored corpses and echoing truths. Every surface reflected wounds—both physical and spiritual. Every breath summoned memories one had buried.

Rin stood in a field of ash. The Corpse General stood across him, in a shrine of bone-lotus, each petal a trauma.

"Show me your suffering," the General whispered.

Rin exhaled.

The world screamed.

First came the memory of being buried alive—choking, clawing, the weight of the world pressing against a coffin of ancestral hate.

Then came the village where corpses dreamed, where he had walked with phantoms whose pain had never faded.

Then the Tower of Echoes, where he wept for a brother who had never existed, slain by his own grief.

Each memory unfolded—raw, unfiltered, ritually exposed. His body bled. Not from wounds, but from emotion made physical.

The Corpse General laughed.

He raised a hand, and a hundred faces emerged from his flesh—disciples he had once trained. He peeled them from his body like masks and threw them at Rin. Each face screamed, You abandoned us.

Rin stood unblinking.

He let the guilt hit him.

He let it crack his ribs open.

And then he refined it.

His Death Core surged, swallowing regret, burning betrayal into silence.

"You wear pain," Rin said, voice like a funeral bell. "I digest it."

The Corpse General's smile faltered.

He stepped forward, summoning his own childhood—memories of kindness slaughtered by duty, of teachers who lied and elders who used him. His soul bled out from his throat in the shape of a black violin.

He played it.

Every note sent blades into Rin's mind—visions of future deaths, of Cinder broken and begging, of Ny'xuan rusting in a god's ribcage, of Rin alone, always alone.

Rin knelt.

But he laughed.

Because this, too, was fuel.

He bit his tongue. Blood smeared the mirror beneath his knees. His voice rose like a broken chant:

"Pain is not an answer. It is not a truth. It is a question. I am the one who refines the answer."

He clapped his hands.

And the Death Core roared.

From it surged every suffering he had ever survived—not as weapon, but as witness. The corpse of his innocence. The bones of his first kill. The ash of every friend he hadn't saved. They did not scream. They stood behind him, a funeral procession that glared at the General.

"You want me to rot in pain," Rin said. "But I walk because I rot. I walk."

The Mirror Grave shattered.

The circle of bone reappeared.

The Corpse General staggered back, robe unraveling. His smile cracked down the middle.

Blood poured from his eye sockets.

"I... I see..." he whispered. "You don't endure pain. You own it."

Rin stepped forward.

"You never wanted to understand pain. You wanted to hide in it."

And with a single motion, Rin placed his palm on the Corpse General's chest.

No technique. No grand spell.

Just death.

The Death Core reclaimed him.

Bone unraveled. Spirit cracked. The General's soul let out a single note—a final harmony—and then dissolved.

Rin stood alone on the dais.

The Bone Thrones were empty.

Cinder approached from the valley's edge.

"He smiled at the end," Cinder said, voice low.

"Yes," Rin answered. "Because I gave him what he never had. Closure."

He turned.

The wind returned.

The valley wept.

To be continued...