The Womb of Ending was an endless horizon of nothingness. It was not a place, nor a time. It was the space between spaces, the breath between breaths. Here, in the center of the void storm, there was no up or down, no warmth nor cold. Only the chill of eternal absence and the slow, suffocating press of entropy. Here, even light dared not tread.
Rin Xie floated, a fragment of a man, barely held together by the slivers of his will. His body was shattered—broken as if the weight of an infinite world had crushed it into dust. His soul, once bound by the fragile tether of his mortality, was now disoriented, adrift in the endless sea of nothing.
He could feel the voices of the dead. They whispered, murmured, screamed. Their memories clung to him like the weight of ancient stones, their regrets and fears swarming like a tide ready to pull him under. The faces, the voices—they were all too much. Every death he had encountered, every life he had absorbed into his Death Core, now had a presence. They weren't just memories anymore. They were a part of him, suffocating him with their sorrow, with their pain.
"I… can't lose myself here," Rin whispered to the emptiness, though his words felt like nothing more than a whisper against the roar of the void.
In his broken form, he could feel his Death Core pulsing faintly, but it was too weak. He was still half-dissolved, fractured in every sense of the word. There were no bones to speak of, no flesh to hold him together. Just a consciousness adrift, a soul fragmented like a shattered mirror, with each shard carrying the weight of a thousand deaths.
His hand moved, though it was little more than a shape without true substance. The coldness of the void clawed at him, trying to tear him apart, but there was something else here—something darker, older. It was not a memory, nor an echo. It was him.
His Death Core was the only thing that remained. It was the foundation of his existence now. Without it, he would be nothing, scattered into the void like so many whispers before him. He had ascended—yes, but this ascension was not a clean break. It had torn him apart instead, his body splintered and sundered as though it were too frail for the weight of transcendence.
The core thrummed weakly, responding to his desperation. He reached inside, pulling at it, forcing it to ignite once more. The sensation was agonizing, each pulse of power like a thousand needles piercing his soul. But he did not falter. He could not. He refused the embrace of healing; he refused to be whole again, because if he did, he would be incomplete. He would still be human, and that was a weakness he could not afford.
"No healing," Rin breathed, through gritted teeth. "I can't heal. I must remain broken."
It was the first decision he made in this new form—this in-between existence that hovered on the edge of life and death. He would not be reborn, but forged anew. A being of death, not of life. He would not return to the realms of reincarnation. He would transcend, step outside the cycle entirely.
Pain bloomed across his shattered body, like fire licking at the skin of a corpse. He welcomed it. Every wound, every crack in his existence was a necessary part of the rebirth. Each moment of agony brought clarity, brought a fragment of his former self, until the pieces began to click back together. Slowly, agonizingly, his body began to reform—not as a whole, but as something stronger than ever. It was a patchwork of pain and death, of anguish and will.
He was becoming something else. Something beyond mortal comprehension.
As Rin worked, the voices of the dead surged. They were no longer whispers—they were a cacophony, pressing down on him from all sides. They knew. They knew what he was doing, and they did not like it. But they could not stop him. They were dead. He was becoming death.
"You are not alone in death," he remembered Xie Yun's bloodied words from the Silent Caverns. They echoed in his mind, clearer than anything else. It was a message—no, a warning.
No one is truly alone in death.
The thought burned, but it also ignited something in Rin's chest. Something that felt almost like… grief. He had not felt it before. Not truly. He had consumed the deaths of others, absorbed their pain, but he had never truly understood it. He had become death itself, yes, but what was the cost?
A sudden pressure, like the weight of a thousand stars, descended upon him. He froze, body trembling with the weight of the presence that now loomed over him. A flicker of light—a distant, otherworldly gleam—pierced the void storm.
It was a celestial warden.
The creature appeared before Rin, its form half-formed from the storm itself, flickering between existence and non-existence. It was a being of pure divine will, an avatar sent to deal with those who transcended the natural order, those who were beyond the reach of the heavens.
"You should not be here," the warden's voice was a rush of wind, a blast of coldness that threatened to freeze the very marrow in Rin's bones.
"I do not belong to you," Rin replied, his voice thin and broken, yet defiant. He felt his Death Core flare in response to the celestial's presence, a silent roar of challenge. "I was not born to live. I was born to die."
The warden's eyes—a shimmer of silver that pierced the void—studied him. For a moment, Rin thought he saw a flicker of uncertainty. But it was gone as quickly as it came. The celestial warden raised its hand, the air around it distorting with pressure, and a beam of light shot toward Rin. The divine energy of the heavens coiled around him, attempting to burn away the corruption of his existence.
But the light did not reach him.
Instead, it shattered against the surface of his soul. The divine beam fractured as if it had met an immovable force, one that could not be crushed or consumed.
Rin laughed, the sound brittle and hollow. He was no longer part of the heavens. He was no longer part of the cycle. The celestial warden could not reach him. It had no power here.
And then, in a breathless moment, Rin understood.
"I am the end," he whispered. "I am the final death, the one that transcends all others."
With the warden's presence still hanging heavy in the air, Rin stepped forward. His body, barely whole but made stronger than ever, moved through the void storm. The world trembled around him as he passed. His steps were slow, deliberate, each one a defiance against the heavens themselves. He did not need to run, for he was already beyond the chase.
The Womb of Ending began to shift, the storm parting as a massive gate began to appear before him—a rift in the very fabric of space. The Ancestral Portal, a remnant of a time before the heavens took control of reincarnation. It pulsed with immortal energy, leaking divine light and power into the void. It was an invitation, a doorway to a realm where death had no dominion.
Rin reached out, his broken hand trembling as he extended it to touch the gate. He could feel the power radiating from it—the raw essence of the divine. His Death Core burned bright, a fire in the storm, and he gathered his strength.
He would cross this threshold.
As his fingers brushed the edge of the portal, his body shattered completely, torn apart by the sheer force of the transition. His soul screamed in pain, a sound that could not be heard by any ear. He did not feel his body break apart—he became the pain, and with it, the death of all things.
The gate swallowed him whole.
And with that, Rin Xie crossed the boundary of life and death. He ascended, not to a higher plane, but to a place where death was no longer something to escape, but something to become.
The heavens' wrath was powerless to stop him.
To be continued…