Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 132 – Cores That Breathe Rot

The stench of ambition had no fragrance. It rotted without scent.

Rin walked through the bone-etched tunnel with the gait of a corpse too weary to fall. His flesh still bore the false pulse of Deathroot Jian, yet beneath that borrowed identity, his Death Core coiled like a serpent in stasis. Watching. Listening. Waiting.

Below the Gravemoss Ridge, beneath shrines where the wind refused to blow, lay the Inner Crucible Vault. A labyrinth not built but grown—its walls were formed from marrow-carved growths, each humming with a pulse that wasn't life but decay refined.

Rin descended without a guide.

Each step brought him closer to the truth he had come to uncover—how the Bonewind Cult had survived the cataclysm that shattered the rogue sect. How they had begun rebuilding its methods, not through reverence or divine inheritance, but through corpse farming.

At the vault's center lay a chamber hollowed from the ribcage of a fallen Divine Beast, its bones strung with black veins pulsing with necrotic qi. Hanging above a lake of stagnant spiritual water was a massive construct—the Rotwomb Cauldron—a vessel not for alchemy, but for creation.

Cultivators did not cultivate here. They were grown.

The Bonewind Cult harvested the corpses of slain prodigies, powerful cultivators who had died with their cores intact, their essence still saturated in unspent potential. These corpses were suspended in fetal poses, soaked in the cauldron's fluid, and used as spiritual matrices—incubators for artificial core gestation.

And it worked.

Rin watched as one such corpse—a young woman still bearing the sigil of the Moonveil Sect—convulsed in its chains. Its chest swelled unnaturally, then breathed. A second later, something pushed free of the sternum. A slick sphere of glistening qi formed, pulsing with mock-life. A breathing core, born of rot.

The cultists chanted bone-scriptures, their tongues blackened by rot-nectar. They called it a miracle. They called it evolution.

Rin knew what it was.

It was desecration.

He remained hidden beneath the shadow of a collapsed spine-pillar. Every death technique he'd refined pulsed in his blood, ready to trigger if needed. He should have turned back. But something else hung in the chamber. A presence unlike the rest.

At the far side of the vault, beyond the cauldron, suspended in a lattice of obsidian bone-threads, was a lotus.

Black petals veined with red. Still closed. Preserved in a shell of fossilized soul wax. No fluctuation of qi surrounded it, yet the void bent slightly around its presence.

A Death Lotus Seed. A relic of the First Death Era. Said to bloom only where mortality had been perfected.

And Rin understood why it had not yet bloomed here.

The Bonewind Cult had not perfected death. They had evaded it.

A bell rang from the ceiling. Hollow. Beckoning.

The ritual was to begin.

Disciples emerged from three tunnels, dragging bodies behind them—two adult cultivators and one child. The child couldn't have been older than ten. His dantian was intact but undeveloped, yet his meridians glowed faintly with potential. Rin recognized the sigil on his torn robes—Cloudchild Clan, minor nobility from the northwest spiritual valleys. Neutral in the wars. But neutrality meant nothing to the dead.

The cult leader appeared last. Not a man. Not anymore.

High Rotfather Bhein, a husk of a once-transcendent cultivator whose body had collapsed into a fluid-bone state, hovered inside a semi-translucent shell of fermented bone marrow. His face was a skeletal rictus, the jaw missing, replaced by writhing prayer tendrils. His presence choked the air without sound.

He gestured with a hand that wasn't a hand.

Ritual began.

They chanted names not their own—taken from the dead to mask spiritual karma. The cauldron heated. The adult bodies twitched, bubbled, then burst into black vapor. Their cores melted into droplets of false essence, descending into the Rotwomb Cauldron. frёewebnoѵēl.com

The child cried out. He wasn't dead.

That wasn't allowed.

Rin's breath caught.

The ritual required death. But the child's soul clung to his body like frost to a dying flame. Rin knew that resistance. He had lived it. But in a room of rot-worshippers, mercy was not a language spoken.

The cauldron surged.

And something—something—recognized Rin.

His Death Core pulsed.

A resonance.

Not from the cult. From the cauldron itself.

The Rotwomb Cauldron had refined too many half-souls. It had absorbed too many fragments. Something within it had begun to stir toward sentience, and it smelled Rin. Knew him as kin. Or rival.

A tendril of cauldron fluid lashed toward him.

Reflex took over.

He stepped backward—only an inch—but the backlash shattered the harmony of the ritual. Spiritual runes dissolved mid-air. The soul threads of the deceased unraveled. The false cores destabilized. High Rotfather Bhein screamed, voice rippling through the marrow walls.

The child convulsed. His soul cracked.

And in the same breath, the cauldron drank him whole.

No delay. No ceremony. One breath, one devourment.

He was gone.

Rin froze.

This world does not protect its young. It eats them.

The Death Core beneath his heart did not rage.

It mourned in silence.

Rin turned toward the Death Lotus Seed. The resonance was stronger now. It recognized him not as thief—but as successor. The fossil shell cracked slightly, petals twitching. His steps drew blood. The backlash had torn the skin from his left arm. His lungs burned from the marrow fumes.

He crossed the distance as High Rotfather Bhein screeched again and the cauldron trembled with rage.

But Rin's hand reached the seed first.

He did not pray.

He claimed.

The moment his fingers closed around the Death Lotus Seed, his Death Core flared. The seed vanished into his spiritual sea—burning a trail of pain through every meridian. Symbols older than language carved themselves across his bones.

He turned.

And ran.

Bone constructs surged from the walls. Disciples screamed, either in rage or religious ecstasy. A wave of bone-ash fire erupted from the cauldron's maw. Rin vaulted over a spiraling tunnel mouth and dove into a refuse chute lined with skull dust and liquefied spirit wax.

He fell.

Broke two ribs.

Kept running.

Blood filled his mouth. His stolen skin began to slough off, revealing death-refined flesh beneath. His disguise was lost. His presence—declared.

But he had the seed.

And that was worth the world's hatred.

He emerged in a corpse garden—bone trees swaying over pits of failed cores—and triggered a silent soul-burst to propel himself over the fence of prayer bones. Crossbow bolts chased him through the grave fog. He tore through two sentries, slit the throat of a third, and disappeared into the woods beneath the ridge.

Each breath felt like knives. Each step—a scream.

But the seed pulsed in his core.

Not dead. Not dormant.

It had chosen.

And Rin, as he collapsed beneath the roots of a bone-laced tree miles from the cult's reach, stared at the skyless night and whispered:

"I will never let them eat another child."

Then he closed his eyes and fell into darkness.

To be continued.