Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 145 – Dead Hearts Still Beat

Rin Xie approached the ruin with cautious steps, the air around him thickening. It was not the lingering spiritual rot of the graveyard or the savage death qi of battlefields past, but a colder, more suffocating presence—one that smothered rather than consumed. The ruin was a shrine, ancient beyond memory, sunken deep into a valley where even the birds dared not sing. It exhaled silence.

The shrine's stones were worn smooth by time, overgrown with creeping ivies whose leaves curled as if choking on their own bitterness. The carvings, once intricate depictions of a celestial figure bathed in ethereal light, had eroded into grotesque visages of hollow eyes and mouths sewn shut. A name, scratched barely legible on a fractured pillar, whispered to Rin as he traced it with a fingertip: Yuan Shiqi.

Yuan Shiqi.

A mortal who had tried to conquer what no mortal could—the immortality of the heart.

Rin's breath caught.

Here was a man who had abandoned flesh for a different kind of death: the death of feeling.

Inside the shrine, the faintest traces of smoke still lingered. A scorched pattern on the stone floor marked a ritual circle, the edges inscribed with blood-red runes that pulsed faintly with dormant power. The entire chamber exuded an oppressive quietude, like a tomb sealed not to keep the dead in, but to keep something locked out.

Rin knelt to inspect the carvings, recognizing something that chilled the marrow beneath his skin—a diagram of the Seventh Layered Heart Technique.

The technique was an ancient, forbidden practice, recorded only in the lost chronicles of the Azure Echo Sect's shadowed annals. It was said that a cultivator who mastered it could fracture their emotional core into layers, severing and extinguishing each in turn—like peeling away the petals of a flower, petal by petal, until nothing remained but a hardened, unfeeling seed.

Seven layers.

Seven deaths of the heart.

The seventh, rumored to grant a soul so barren it transcended mortal weakness—an immortal void.

But what price?

Rin read through the faded inscriptions carefully, his mind absorbing the crushing gravity behind the doctrine. The first layer was the most excruciating: Grief Severance.

To sever grief, the cultivator had to burn out the memory of love itself—the love that seeded all pain, all longing, and all vulnerability.

Without that first fracture, none of the others could be reached. Without that fracture, the core remained tethered to the world by invisible cords of sorrow.

Rin's eyes narrowed. He knelt and pulled from the folds of his travel-worn cloak a brittle, yellowed drawing. It was a crude sketch he had drawn as a child within the walls of the Azure Echo Sect—a memory sealed tight in paper and ink. The drawing depicted the sect's tower, its fluttering banners, and the faces of his childhood friends, naive and bright.

His hand trembled as he held the drawing near the ritual circle. The edges curled at the touch of the faint residual energy emanating from the shrine. He could feel it—grief older than the soil beneath his feet, a hunger wrapped in silk and lies.

Rin exhaled slowly, the faintest hint of a shudder crossing his frame.

This was not just a ritual. This was a requiem.

He struck a flint.

A spark caught on the brittle paper.

Flames danced, bright and hungry.

The fire consumed the colors—the faces of the past, the laughter of friends long dead, the fleeting warmth of a life left behind.

His fingers clenched, nails digging into his palm.

Pain flared—a searing agony that clawed at his soul.

But he did not relent.

The flames climbed higher.

The drawing crumpled into ash.

Rin's breath was ragged, his vision blurring. But his heart did not break.

Because it was already breaking.

This was the first layer of death for the heart—the Grief Severance.

And with it, the cold seed of immortality was planted deep in his chest.

He looked at the ashes scattered on the stone floor—once a bridge to his past, now a grave for his innocence.

No tears came.

Only a steady pulse beneath his ribs—a heartbeat dead yet defiant.

The shrine seemed to shudder in response, the walls whispering forgotten lamentations of those who had dared the same path and failed.

Rin closed his eyes.

He saw his master's face, twisted in the agony of sacrifice. The boy who had watched him kill, silent and unblinking, shadows flickering beneath his eyes. The elder general who had preached pain as the only truth.

Each image a fracture in the layers of his heart, each memory a splinter to be severed.

The path ahead was long, and every step would demand a death of feeling.

But for now, the first layer had been broken.

The dead hearts still beat.

Because death itself could not claim what was already hollow.

Outside the shrine, the wind rose, carrying with it a low, mournful chant. It spoke of forgotten mortals who had tried and failed to sever their hearts, whose souls remained chained to suffering, unable to transcend.

Rin folded the cloak over his shoulder, stepping away from the shrine's shadow. Somewhere deep inside, a part of him recognized the cold embrace of the Seventh Layered Heart.

But it was not mercy that led him onward.

It was necessity.

Because to conquer death, he must first conquer the heart's last breath.

And that breath would not be given freely.

To be continued...