Cultivator of the End: I Refine My Own Death-Chapter 124 – Threshold of Suffering

There was no air in this place.

No sound, no ground. No shape to the void. Only the sensation of rawness, peeled from flesh, scraped from bone, bled from soul.

Rin floated—though there was no direction. He drifted—not because there was movement, but because there was nothing to hold him.

This was the Threshold of Suffering, not a location, but a metaphysical convergence—where agony stripped identity down to instinct and desire, where all cultivators who danced too close to death's edge must either refine... or be refined.

Rin's consciousness burned like an ember inside a hurricane of anguish. He no longer had limbs. No spine. Only the awareness of absence. The memory of pain.

And then—

A weeping face formed in the void.

Not conjured. Not summoned.

Remembered.

She appeared with hair like rivers of dusk, and eyes swollen with grief that had once been beautiful in its sincerity. Lips trembling with a love Rin had long buried beneath layers of betrayal and death. Her voice came not from her throat, but from inside Rin's marrow.

"Why didn't you save me?"

Her hands reached for him—not to embrace, but to hold him still, to remind him.

He tried to turn away. But there was no turning here.

This was not a memory. It was an embodiment. Of helplessness. Of vulnerability. Of the boy he once was, shattered at the altar of trust.

She screamed—not with volume, but with weight.

Rin's Death Core throbbed in his spiritual center, flickering erratically. His cultivation meant nothing here. His techniques had no form. This was a place where suffering was currency—and Rin was bankrupt in the one coin that mattered: acceptance.

His former lover's eyes bled tears of bone.

"You cultivated death, but ran from your own powerlessness."

And then her mouth split open, wider and wider, revealing not a throat, but a tunnel of shrieking faces—each one a version of himself. Broken. Dying. Screaming in silence.

The pain was unbearable.

And yet—

Rin did not flinch.

He watched. He let it be real. He let her grief pierce him, let it drag out every helpless cry he'd once swallowed. Let it unravel the strands of pride and control he had woven so tightly around his core.

In the marrow of suffering, he did not resist. He refined.

One by one, the screaming faces began to burn. Not with flame, but with clarity. With a silence sharper than steel. A silence not of numbness—but of command. A silence earned. freewebnoveℓ.com

The weeping face dissolved.

And in its place: a core of empty nerve, a black filament of void-stuff, floating in the shape of a spine.

It flowed into him.

[Technique Gained: Void Nerve]

A cultivation refinement that converts pain into silence.

Users can experience any agony, no matter how catastrophic, without movement, without scream, without surrender.

It is not immunity. It is dominion.

Rin's soul reassembled. His Death Core stabilized—reforged with the memory of helplessness now refined into will. His skeletal form reformed from the void, nerves pulsing with absence. His heart did not beat, but the power in his veins remembered what it meant to beat despite loss.

He awakened.

Back on the altar. Mid-ritual.

The bone drill was still embedded in his spine. The marrow-siphoning runes still etched across his back. The sect acolytes were still chanting.

But he was no longer Rin Xie, the trapped offering.

He was Rin Xie, the death that cannot be extracted.

His eyes opened. The Death Core flared—black and silver, laced with Void Nerve spirals. Pain seared through his nerves, but he did not react. His face was as calm as stone. The agony of marrow extraction, soul violation, and nerve evisceration all passed through him like wind through void.

The bone-devouring formation continued its cycle, unaware that the core it fed upon had become a trap.

Rin extended his awareness into the runes.

They were built on inversion matrices—convert pain into energy, transfer suffering into vitality, extract marrow for longevity. And now, with Void Nerve stabilizing his internal world, he could invert the inversion.

He pulsed his core.

The ritual reversed.

The channels meant to drain him now drank from the surrounding sect.

Every acolyte felt it first in their teeth.

They screamed as their own nerves began to ignite, their own marrow liquefying inside their bones. Their limbs twisted, eyes bulged, veins darkened with their own unrefined grief. The pain circuits they had constructed to consume him had turned against them.

"Impossible!" the sect master shrieked. "He was helpless! He was broken!"

Rin rose from the altar, the bone drill still inside his back—but no blood leaked. The wound had become symbolic, a threshold sigil burned into his existence.

His voice was colder than bone:

"You tried to consume me... with pain you never earned."

He stepped forward.

The ground itself twisted. The marrow-soaked altar grew talons and chains, dragging down every dying acolyte into the bone-pit below. The Death Refining Formation no longer followed the Bone-Eating Sect's script—it followed Rin's will.

And Rin's will was absolute.

He raised one hand.

Soul Flare: Marrow Bloom.

The suffering of every cultist—channeled through their own stolen techniques—erupted into ghostly white flame from within their bones. Ribcages split. Spines burst. Skulls wept glowing tears as soul-fire consumed every last bit of vitality they'd stolen.

Their pain became the fuel for their end.

The sect master howled and tried to flee—but his own marrow collapsed. His spine folded like wet paper. Rin walked past his crawling body and gazed at the mural behind the altar—an image of a great skeletal dragon, worshipped by the Bone-Eating Sect as their progenitor.

He pressed his palm to the mural.

Death Qi seeped into the stone.

And the dragon mural wept.

Not blood. Not marrow. But black lotus petals—suffering refined into offering.

Rin closed his eyes.

He gathered the essence of the devoured sect, inhaling the scent of scorched nerve and broken ambition. His Death Core pulsed with deep resonance, layered now with Void Nerve and Marrow Ascendancy. The temple began to collapse behind him—its function complete, its masters slaughtered, its purpose dissolved.

And as he stepped into the open night once more, beneath a blood-moon sky veiled in death clouds, Rin whispered a name:

"Qian Yu."

The name of the woman whose weeping face had nearly undone him.

A name he no longer feared.

He would remember her.

Not with regret.

But with the silence of mastery.

To be continued...