Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 128 – Flesh-Thread Puppets

The Forest of Withered Throats whispered like a butcher's lullaby.

Its trees grew in bent spirals, bark peeled and stitched with string, their roots tangled with the ribs of forgotten beasts. The mist that coiled through the air was not moisture, but the breath of once-living lungs crushed into vapor and ritual smoke. No birds sang here. Only the click of bone-thread wind chimes hanging from hollowed branches.

Rin stepped into the forest with a calm forged from silence.

Behind him, the death-flame of his Ego still flickered—a residual echo from the Heaven-Hating Scripture fragment. His core no longer pulsed with simple death. It now throbbed with intentional absence, hollow yet honed, as if he carried within him the shape of a grave yet to be dug.

The deeper he walked, the louder the forest became—not with sound, but with wrongness. There were no corpses here, yet the air reeked of flesh turned inside out.

The rogue sect called themselves the Threadbound Choir.

They did not sing.

They stitched.

It began with murmurs in the villages Rin passed—tales of kin returning from death, hollow-eyed and whispering lullabies they'd never known in life. Of fathers rebuilt with crooked limbs and wives reborn with too many fingers. These constructs wandered only at dusk, carrying offerings of bone-powder incense to unknown masters.

The Threadbound Choir had no known origin sect, no recorded patriarchs, no immortal ancestors. They were an absence in the annals, a cancer in the corners of the world. What little Rin uncovered spoke of a technique older than any cultivation path—a forbidden synthesis of memory and marrow.

The flesh puppets were not corpses. They were replicas.

Constructs made from stolen skin, sewn together with sinew-thread and infused with lingering spiritual echoes scraped from the Sea of Recollection.

Each puppet was memory made meat.

Rin found the first of them kneeling in a glade of split tree-trunks arranged like cracked vertebrae. The puppet's back was hunched, shoulders bound in black silk thorns, and its skull was partially translucent—revealing a brain laced with golden filaments, twitching in rhythm with a songless hymn.

It turned to face him.

And wore his brother's face.

The features were exact—down to the scar beneath the left eye, the cracked tooth, the uneven eyebrows he always refused to fix. But it was not him.

Not Shaye.

The eyes were wrong. Empty, yet desperately trying to mimic fullness.

Rin did not attack.

He froze, as if the forest had turned to a stage and this puppet the last actor left alive.

The construct rose, joints creaking like wet leather. Its hands twitched, then folded into a shape Shaye used to use when they were children—a childish gang sign for "you're safe."

It said nothing. Just watched.

Rin's breath caught.

The last time he saw his brother, Shaye had cursed him.

Had tried to kill him.

Had betrayed him to the orphan sect's elders in exchange for a false promise of advancement. The betrayal carved a trench through Rin's soul so deep it had never scabbed.

But still.

The face held weight.

The puppet tilted its head. Then took a step forward.

Rin activated Ego Death Breathing.

The world flattened. Emotion became shape, then color, then quiet.

But the face remained.

Ego Death dulled his grief, but it did not dissolve his memory. And memory was the thread the puppet had been stitched from.

The creature raised its right hand and made a fist—three knuckles folded, two raised. A signal.

Shaye's signal. For when danger lurked and escape was required.

Something inside Rin cracked.

He did not destroy it. Not yet.

He followed it.

The puppet turned and walked deeper into the forest, and Rin followed like a man chasing the echo of a ghost that never existed.

They passed through glades of blood-dye trees, whose leaves wept serum, and across a bridge made of linked jawbones over a stagnant lake where shadows had teeth.

The puppet paused at a mound of stitched corpses—four dozen, all in the midst of ritual decay. Thread-bound scriptures were woven into their tongues. Each corpse moved with a single breath, their lungs inflating in unison every seven seconds.

Puppet-choir.

The Threadbound Choir was here. Watching. Listening.

The Shaye-faced construct extended one finger toward the mound, then pointed it at Rin's heart.

A test.

A temptation.

Rin did not speak. He reached into his Death Core, and called forth Ashen Recollection Flame—a technique he had never named, for it had not yet fully formed.

Born not of simple death, but of the death of trust.

When Shaye betrayed him, something deeper than loyalty had burned. The betrayal had not killed Rin, but it had set something within him on fire.

Now, that fire found form.

The Ashen Recollection Flame emerged from Rin's palm as a wisp of black-silver, edged in memory. Not heat, but loss. Not pain, but the echo of something sacred burned away.

He did not throw it.

He held it.

And looked at the puppet.

It mimicked a frown. Stepped forward. Then raised its arms—and hugged him.

Rin let it. Just for a moment.

Just long enough to recognize that even guilt could rot.

Then he whispered into its ear, "You are not my brother."

And placed the flame in its spine.

The puppet did not scream. It unwound—thread by thread, memory by memory. Its skin peeled into smoke shaped like Shaye's laughter. Its eyes burst into forgotten lullabies. Its bones cracked with the sound of a final apology that was never offered.

Rin stood alone again.

The choir-mound behind him began to twitch.

Rin turned.

From the mound rose six puppets, each a patchwork abomination of known faces. Old sectmates. A master who had taught him how to hold a blade. Even the girl who once gave him half a steamed bun during a storm.

They were all puppets now.

Rin did not hesitate.

He activated Ego Death Breathing—and became still.

Then fed the Ashen Recollection Flame with his memories. The guilt. The grief. The betrayal. Each thread of emotion added to the flame until it roared with the shape of a life that had trusted too many lies.

He swept his hand.

The flame surged.

The mound screamed—not with voices, but with remembered voices. A cacophony of pasts set ablaze.

Puppets fell. Threads melted. Memory became ash.

And then—silence.

Rin stood in the center of a graveyard of imitations. No triumph. No sorrow. Just stillness.

A figure emerged from the mist—a true cultivator this time, not thread-bound. Robes black, eyes sewn shut, lips pierced by nine needles.

He bowed.

"You passed the trial," the blind man rasped. "You carry within you the seed of pure loss. Would you join the Choir? Become conductor to the flesh-thread symphony?"

Rin's gaze was iron.

"You do not sing."

The blind man smiled.

"No. We remember. And in remembering, we replace." frёewebnoѵēl.com

Rin reached into his core—and shaped the final refinement of the Ashen Recollection Flame.

It pulsed, alive with betrayal and severed blood.

He whispered, "Then let this be your forgetting."

And fed the flame to the Choirmaster's shadow.

The man's body collapsed into thread, but his shadow screamed.

Rin burned the scream too.

No trace remained.

Not of puppets. Not of the sect. Not of false brothers wearing stolen faces.

Only ash.

Only silence.

Only Rin Xie, who walked out of the Forest of Withered Throats lighter than when he entered—not because a burden had been lifted, but because he had refined the burden into power.

Ability Gained: Ashen Recollection Flame

A soul-born flame formed from the refined death of trust, guilt, and betrayal. Burns memory, imitation, and emotional anchors. Especially effective against constructs of recollection and soul-puppetry. Side effect: overuse may erode personal attachments and memory fidelity.

Insight Gained: Death of Guilt

An emotional death derived from witnessing the false resurrection of lost loved ones. Permits greater resistance to memory-based spiritual attacks. Increases refinement compatibility with loss-aligned death techniques.

Rin did not look back.

Some faces were not meant to be remembered. Some memories were not meant to be carried.

But all of them—every betrayal, every false echo—could be refined.

To be continued...