Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 102 – The Eyes of the Unclean God

The Valley of Withered Bone, once a place of death and ruin, now felt more like a slumbering beast, its ancient breath rising with the wind. The weight of the souls Rin had absorbed lingered in the air, pressing down on him with each step. He had moved deeper into the valley, seeking answers he could not yet fully comprehend, when his eyes were drawn to something far more mysterious than the spirits that wandered its haunted plains.

At the center of the valley stood an altar of sorts—an ancient stone structure, half-crushed by the ravages of time. It was surrounded by ruined statues, worn smooth by eons of weathering. Yet one statue caught Rin's attention with an intensity that made his heart skip a beat.

It was a figure unlike any deity he had seen before—neither of the Celestial Order nor the chaotic forces that had played with the threads of life and death. This was something forgotten, something older, something that made the very air tremble.

The statue was grotesque in its perfection. It stood with its arms spread wide, its stone face contorted in a twisted mockery of a divine expression. Its eyes were wide open, staring outward as if it could see through the fabric of reality itself. The stone was dark, almost obsidian, with veins of crimson running through it, as though blood once flowed within the deity's veins, only to be stilled by time. The figure resembled a man, but there was something primal about it, something that felt more ancient than anything Rin had encountered. There was an unsettling aura around it, an energy that gnawed at his mind, urging him to touch it.

Rin approached the statue cautiously, his eyes locked on those hauntingly vacant eyes. As his fingers brushed against the cool stone, a sudden pulse of energy shot through him. It was not physical. It was something deeper, more profound—a connection between worlds.

A vision erupted in his mind. The very fabric of existence seemed to warp and twist, and Rin felt himself pulled into a place beyond time, beyond reason. He stood in the center of an endless void, surrounded by broken heavens—celestial realms shattered and scattered like debris in the cosmos. The ground beneath his feet was blackened, as though the very foundation of existence had been burned to ash. The air was thick with the scent of rot and decay, and the heavens themselves were bleeding.

Then, before him, a figure emerged—a familiar one. It was himself, but not the Rin Xie who had walked into this valley. This was a version of him from the future, his form towering, monstrous, his body draped in dark, swirling shadows. His eyes burned with an unholy fire, a terrible power radiating from his very soul.

And in his hands, he held something. It was the heavens themselves—alive, pulsating like a great beating heart. But the heart was broken. It was sickly, its veins twisted and rotting. Rin's future self grasped the heavens by the throat and began to choke it. The heavens squirmed in his grasp, desperate, but unable to escape. The vision twisted violently as Rin's future self tightened his grip, strangling the divine forces, squeezing the life out of it. The heavens, once a perfect order, were nothing but a dying thing in his hands.

With one final, sickening snap, the vision collapsed.

Rin fell to his knees, his breath ragged, the overwhelming weight of the vision threatening to crush him. His body trembled as he opened his eyes, feeling an unfamiliar heat coursing through him. The Death Refinement Core that resided in his chest pulsed with black ichor, like a corrupted heart, pumping dark power through his veins.

He looked down at his hands, his palms slick with the ichor. It was not just the blood of death—it was something else entirely. Something ancient. The core had evolved, its power had changed. It was no longer simply death—it was the essence of destruction, the undoing of all that had ever been.

The vision had revealed something to him—a prophecy, a future he could not yet understand. It was not a matter of defeating the heavens; it was a matter of becoming the force that tore them apart, strangling them until they bled out of existence. The heavens, the divine law that had once governed the universe, were now destined to be destroyed by his very hands.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the pulse of the core within him. The energy that swirled around him was foreign, chaotic, yet it felt like a natural extension of his being. This was no longer simply the Death Refinement Dao. This was something older, more primal. Something that had been forgotten by time and erased from the celestial records.

A force that predated even life itself.

A cold realization struck him as he began to understand what he had uncovered. The Unclean God. The statue—the forgotten deity that had once been worshipped and then cast aside by the Celestial Order—was not a god of life or death, but of the original law. The law that had existed before life, before the heavens, before any form of creation. It was a god that represented death, not as an end, but as the beginning. It was the first law—the primal force of annihilation that had existed long before the concept of creation had been born. This god was the force that preceded all things, the one that the Celestial Order had feared and rejected.

It was no wonder the heavens had cast it aside. It was the embodiment of absolute destruction, the antithesis of everything they sought to uphold.

Rin's pulse quickened. The implications of this knowledge were staggering. If he embraced the true essence of the Unclean God, he would not only destroy the heavens—he would undo everything. The fabric of reality would unravel, and the world as he knew it would cease to exist. But that was the price of freedom. To create something new, something beyond the confines of the heavens, the cycle of life and death had to be broken.

The Death Refinement Core within him hummed with the energy of the Unclean God. His soul burned with its presence. He had touched something that no one should ever have dared to touch, and it had fused with him. It was no longer just a Dao—it was a curse, an irreversible force that would change him forever.

As Rin stood there, contemplating the magnitude of what had just happened, the wind began to stir. The sky above him—once a constant, serene dome—began to crack. A jagged line of light appeared, stretching across the heavens, like a scar in the fabric of the universe. It spread rapidly, growing wider and wider, until the entire sky above him seemed to split open.

The ominous crack in the sky was not just a sign of the heavens breaking apart—it was a sign that someone had found him. The soul-tracking sect hounds were on his trail. He could feel them—faint at first, but unmistakably there. They had found his location, and they were coming for him.

Rin's heart stilled. The time for hesitation was over. The heavens were already beginning to break, the sky above him shattering, and with it, his destiny had been sealed.

The Unclean God had awoken within him, and there was no turning back.

To be continued... freeωebnovēl.c૦m