Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 152: The Corpse Moon Ritual

When the moon forgets how to die, the dead remember how to breathe.

The night did not fall.

It descended—slow, suffocating, heavy with omens. The moon, bloated and bruised, pulsed like a corpse held too long in stagnant water. Its light dripped through the canopy of deadwood trees, turning the forest into a realm of exposed flesh and phantom breath.

Rin Xie walked alone.

His robes hung loose, caked with the remnants of spiritual ichor and dried soil. Beneath the fabric, his body was changing—not healing, not growing, but evolving in a direction that did not belong to mortals or immortals.

The pulse he had carved from death still echoed faintly in the artifact he carried, but already he had outpaced its significance.

He had come seeking whispers. And they had answered.

Rumors of a Corpse Moon Ritual—a technique said to awaken forgotten corpse beasts, bind their souls to moonlight, and birth undying soldiers—had spread through a withered spirit trader's dying breath. Rin had bought that rumor with one tooth and the memory of his own mother's funeral.

It had led him here.

To the Cradle of Pale Roots, an ancient ruin buried beneath a forest that had not bloomed in four centuries. No map marked it. No path led to it.

But death recognized its own. And it welcomed Rin like an old, bitter friend.

The entrance was a maw—half-collapsed temple gates, swallowed by tangled root-flesh and cracked bone pillars. Sigils, long since faded, bled faintly in the death spectrum. Rin passed beneath them and felt his Death Core stir.

There was no sound.

Only weight—the weight of rituals unfinished, of corpses dreaming still.

He descended a spiral of steps carved from jawbone and obsidian.

At the bottom lay a vast ritual chamber, circular, hollowed into the earth like a birth wound. And within it, figures in black crimson robes stood around a massive corpse-beast—sixty feet long, serpent-bodied with a face like a newborn child stitched to a war elephant's skull. It did not breathe.

Yet it pulsed.

Corpse lanterns floated overhead, burning on rot instead of flame. In the center, a priest knelt—arms spread, skin flayed into banners.

"The Corpse Moon awakens," the priest whispered, voice slithering through the chamber. "Tonight, death becomes a master of obedience."

Rin crouched in shadow, his hand resting on Ny'xuan, the sentient dagger forged from a god's bones.

He did not strike.

Not yet.

The priest raised a shard of moon-crystal, etched with divine rot sigils.

One by one, the cultists chanted, shedding blood from tongues, eyes, fingertips. Their pain fed the circle—a ring of corpse Qi drawn in symbols only the dead could understand. The massive corpse-beast convulsed, its skin cracking, revealing muscle sewn with human hands.

The ritual was precise.

Methodical.

Wicked.

It was a method to enslave death, not understand it. To use decay as a tool, not a path. It was the opposite of Rin's cultivation—opportunistic thievery, without sacrifice, without comprehension.

Still, Rin waited.

He watched as the corpse-beast's chest began to move. Once. Twice. A third time.

And then—its eye opened. Hollow, moonlit, and alive.

That was when Rin acted.

Rin stepped into the circle, Death Qi coiling from his body in threads of black mist. Every strand bore a different death he had suffered: drowned, buried, betrayed, abandoned. He was not merely interrupting the ritual.

He was consuming it.

The corpse priests recoiled. One shouted, "Who dares—"

Rin's presence silenced him.

He extended both hands, palms open, and began absorbing the ritual's Qi directly. Not by technique, but by force of Dao. His Death Core—twisted, evolving, unstable—drew in the ambient corpse Qi like a black hole drinking memories.

The moon-crystal shattered midair.

Corpse lanterns imploded.

The chanting fell into screams.

"HE'S CONSUMING THE CORPSE VEIN!"

Rin's eyes bled darkness. His bones groaned. His fingernails cracked. The ritual was not meant for one body. It was meant for a collective spell.

And Rin took it alone.

In moments, the corpse Qi overwhelmed him, flooding his meridians with memories of rot, mindless hunger, and ancient deaths that did not belong to his timeline.

He saw the first corpse-beast birth.

He saw mortals torn open to bind soul-stitches.

He saw the origin of the ritual: a pact between a Moon Demon and a forgotten Death Pantheon.

Then—

Silence.

Rin stood in the center, trembling.

The ritual circle had crumbled. The priests were dead, their bodies withered like drained insects.

And Rin's Core... pulsed.

It had changed.

His Core, once shaped like a lotus with petals of bone and shadow, now held a twisted ring of corpse flesh around it—pulsing, breathing, alive.

This was not a technique.

It was a mutation.

He had absorbed too much. Taken in Qi meant for a construct, not a soul. Part of him now resonated with corpse-beasts—not as a master, but as kin.

Ny'xuan hissed inside his sheath. "Fool. You've seeded your foundation with gluttony. This will bloom into a calamity."

Rin didn't respond.

His eyes were fixed on the corpse-beast—still breathing.

But its body had changed. Where once it was stillbound and inert, now it shimmered with a grotesque aura. Rin's presence had not killed it.

It had awakened it.

One eye opened.

Then two.

Then ten.

The flesh melted, shifting and twitching. Bones reconfigured. It shrank—compressing inward like a nightmare coiled to strike. Its new form was smaller, humanoid, but wrong. Eyes on its chest. Arms formed of spines. A skull that bore a grinning crescent.

It looked at Rin.

And smiled.

Then it vanished—slipping into shadow like oil into water.

Rin did not chase.

He sat, cross-legged, and meditated.

He needed to understand what had taken root inside him.

Above the ruin, the bloated corpse-moon pulsed once more and dimmed.

In his meditation, Rin saw visions—not dreams, not illusions, but echoes of what he had absorbed.

He saw himself split into fragments—one walking the path of death, another walking the path of the corpse, and a third... walking backward, undoing existence itself.

He saw the ritual again, but this time, it was his own body on the altar. His heart, carved and offered. His breath, transformed into chains that bound legions of dead things.

And then the whisper.

You will create what even the gods fear.

A death that cannot be undone.

Rin opened his eyes.

The chamber was still.

Only a single bone flower bloomed in the center of the corpse-beast's former resting place. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm

He picked it.

It bled.

To be continued...