Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 138 — The First Debt

The twilight sky hung heavy over Qingmu village, a pallid bruise that bled the last light from the dying day. Clouds writhed like restless spirits, and the air was thick with the acrid tang of smoke, ash, and old sorrows. Here, where the whispering woods curled around cracked huts like skeletal fingers, a dying faith clung desperately to brittle hope.

Once, Qingmu had been a sanctuary for disciples of the Azure Echo Sect—their azure robes a beacon against the creeping darkness. Those disciples had been guardians, wardens against the chaos that clawed at the mortal realm's fragile edges. Their silence now was an eternal echo, drowned beneath layers of dust and lies.

In the hollowed core of this ruin, a different god had risen—an impostor shrouded in flame and false words. A rogue cultivator who fed on fear and grief, twisting the villagers' despair into a cult of fire and sacrifice. They blamed Rin Xie, the one who shattered their protectors, for the death and ruin they now endured. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com

The village square was no longer a place of gathering but a theater of dread. At its center, a rough altar carved from ancient stone stood stained with old blood and fresh tears. Around it, villagers knelt, voices a low chant, broken and trembling, calling upon their false god to deliver salvation from the same shadow they claimed had brought their ruin.

Bound and pale as winter's frost, a boy knelt upon the altar. His small hands, wrapped in withered strips of bark, lay motionless. His eyes, wide and vacant, held the silent weight of acceptance — the unspoken knowledge that he was meant to die here, to pay with blood for sins he never committed.

The false prophet's voice rose above the chant, honeyed and venomous.

"Rin Xie's crimes have cursed us. Only through sacrifice can we cleanse this blight."

The villagers believed. They feared. They obeyed.

But Rin Xie stood at the edge of their world, a shadow in the gathering gloom.

The first to sense him were the children—who froze in terror—then the elders, whose eyes narrowed with bitter hatred. The crowd parted as he stepped forward, the air growing cold and brittle with his presence. His robe, dark as the void between stars, billowed like a storm cloud about him, the corpse-rooted blade hanging silent at his side—a relic of death, an instrument of reckoning.

He surveyed the scene with merciless clarity. The boy. The altar. The villagers, twisted by grief and falsehood into puppets of fear.

His voice was the quiet before a storm, sharp and absolute.

"Let the boy live."

The words fell like a guillotine's edge through the chanting crowd.

Disbelief flickered across faces, fragile as dry leaves in a harsh wind.

One mother wept openly, her prayers tangled with rage.

The false deity's disciples snarled, claws of faith unsheathed in fury.

But Rin's eyes held none of their fear, none of their desperation.

When the villagers surged to seize the boy, a wave of cold death qi burst forth from Rin—black frost curling through the air like living smoke, snapping with latent violence. Tendrils of darkness writhed, cutting off their advance with precision and silence.

Rin's blade whispered through the night—a ghost song of bone and ash. Each strike severed lies, crushed false faith, and shattered fragile hope. Blood spilled, but none was his.

When the chaos stilled, the boy was free. Still trembling, but alive.

Yet Rin's mercy was a calculus. A debt forged in shadow.

He turned his gaze to the village—the homes, the granaries, the stores of survival—and with a flick of his wrist, summoned flames as cold and merciless as death itself. The fire was a ravenous specter, devouring wood and straw with insatiable hunger.

The screams that rose were not for the boy—no, they were the wails of shattered illusion, of faith burnt to ash alongside the village's last embers.

From the hilltop overlooking the burning ruins, Rin watched the smoke spiral upward, a black serpent swallowed by the choking dusk. The fire's glow traced the contours of the village, burning away lies and fear, as cold stars blinked down, indifferent.

"This is the first debt," Rin murmured, voice heavy with the weight of unspoken sins. "A life saved must be balanced by ruin endured."

The boy's fate was spared—but the cost was entire.

Qingmu's ashes would be a monument to cold justice, to the harsh calculus of survival and retribution in a world where mercy was currency paid in ruin.

The boy followed silently, footsteps light against the scorched earth, eyes hollow pools that reflected none of the fire behind them. No words passed between them; none were needed.

Rin saw the boy's silence as a mirror of his own—an absence of grief, a fortress of calculated detachment. The boy's silence was a blade—sharp and unforgiving.

Could this silence hold against the storm of memory and pain that clawed at every soul? Was this the boy's debt, or Rin's?

Qingmu was a symptom of a wider decay. In the mortal realm, villages like these were ciphers, fragile bastions caught between the shifting tides of power and ruin. The fall of the Azure Echo Sect had left a void—one swiftly filled with superstition, false idols, and the whispered promises of power.

The cult of the false deity was a cancer, feeding on fear and fracture. They were but one thread in a tapestry unraveling beneath the weight of gods who no longer cared, and men who sought only to survive by any means.

Rin's choice—neither savior nor destroyer, but executioner of fate's cruel ledger—was a grim testament to a world where only the strongest carved meaning from chaos.

Rin's eyes met the boy's, the firelight flickering across pale skin.

"I spared your life," he said quietly. "But your silence is your debt. Speak it, and it will be your undoing."

The boy's nod was slow, deliberate, a silent vow forged in the crucible of ruin.

Rin turned his back on the burning village, the weight of his path settling deeper into his bones. To save the living was to condemn the world around them.

To use the living and the dead—this was the dark calculus by which he would carve his destiny.

To be continued...