Novels2Search
The Rebirth of Flint: Journey to Find Past Life Memories
Chapter 13:Echoes of Past Lives in a River of Blood

Chapter 13:Echoes of Past Lives in a River of Blood

The impact sent tremors through the earth, but Flint barely registered the pain as she crashed into the ground. Her body had always processed pain differently—a quirk that had served her well until now. But as she attempted to move, the disconnect between intent and action became jarringly clear: her legs wouldn't respond.

Crimson droplets pooled beneath her, seeping into the soil of the valley floor. The mountain winds whispered through the peaks of Soaring Heaven, carrying a faint scent of Flint's blood. And with each gust, the smell drew him closer.

The cultivator approached with uneven steps, his body wreathed in an unnatural reddish-brown light that seemed to devour the shadows around him. His cultivation robes, once pristine, now hung in tatters, darkened with stains that Flint didn't want to contemplate. But it was his eyes that held her attention—vacant yet somehow hungry, as if whatever remained of his consciousness had been hollowed out and replaced with raw, insatiable need.

"Fresh... soul..." The words slithered from his lips, barely coherent. "Such... fresh... soul..."

The wind picked up, and his hair writhed like living shadows around his face, giving him the appearance of some ancient, terrible spirit that had clawed its way up from the depths of legend. His sword, still gleaming despite everything, caught the light as he raised it.

Flint tried to shift away, but her useless legs betrayed her. The cultivator's blade plunged down, tearing through flesh and muscle with mechanical precision.

The deep red liquid sprayed and splattered across the ground, seeping into the earth like a macabre painting. Droplets sparkled in the sunlight, a morbid contrast against the green grass and brown dirt.

The madman's sword dripped with her blood as he raised it again, his movements jerky and inhuman. The reddish-brown light around him pulsed like a diseased heart, and his lips moved in patterns that might have once been incantations but now were nothing more than the mutterings of a mind lost to whatever dark art had consumed him.

The reddish-brown light burrowed into Flint's mind like burning needles, and her consciousness exploded with foreign memories. They crashed through her thoughts in a torrent of terror and despair, each soul's final moments replaying with horrifying clarity.

The reddish-brown light burrowed into Flint's mind like burning needles, and her consciousness exploded with foreign memories. They crashed through her thoughts in a torrent of terror and despair, each soul's final moments replaying with horrifying clarity.

"Why... why me?" A young hunter's voice echoed in her mind. She saw through his eyes as he taught his son to clean their old rifle, felt his pride when the boy made his first clean shot at a target. The memory twisted into his final moments, his desperate thoughts of the child waiting at home for a father who would never return.

Another voice crashed through her: "My love... our wedding day..." A man's memories flooded her consciousness—stolen kisses behind the village well, carefully saved coins from selling pelts and trading ammunition, dreams of a future now forever lost. His fiancée would stand waiting at their meeting spot near the elder tree, watching the mountain path for footsteps that would never come.

The voices multiplied, each carrying its own weight of lost futures: Two brothers who had hunted these slopes since childhood, their laughter echoing through the valleys as they competed to see who could spot game first. Their rifles, passed down from their father, were now rusting somewhere in the underbrush while their mother would still set out two bowls of rice each morning in desperate hope.

An old tracker who had survived three harsh winters by knowing exactly which mountain herbs could feed a family when the snows grew too deep. He'd taught the village youth how to maintain their weapons in the damp mountain air, keeping the precious metal from corroding. His granddaughter had begged him to teach her his secrets—she would never learn them now.

A father and son, their last moments eternally entangled—the father's desperate attempt to push his boy behind him, the son's final act of defiance as he refused to leave his father's side. Their hunting rifles lay broken beside them, useless against a cultivator's power. Their blood had mingled in the soil, their souls devoured together by the creature that now stood before Flint.

Each memory carried not just the horror of death, but the weight of all the small, precious moments that made up a life: the familiar weight of a rifle slung across the back, the taste of fresh bread on winter mornings, the warmth of a lover's embrace, the proud tears in a parent's eyes, the simple joy of walking familiar paths under an autumn sky. All these lives, all these memories, now trapped in the maelstrom of madness that possessed the cultivator's hollow shell.

The voices wove together into a chorus of anguish that threatened to tear Flint's sanity apart: "My children..." "My wife..." "My dreams..." "My life..." Each cry carried the bitter taste of futures stolen, of stories cut brutally short by the blade that now dripped with her blood.

Through the haze of stolen memories, Flint watched in horror as the scene replayed itself through dozens of eyes. Each victim's final moments aligned perfectly with her present reality—the cultivator's unnatural movements, the meticulous drawing of circles, the absolute certainty of what was to come.

She saw through their memories how their bullets curved away harmlessly, deflected by shields of natural aura. She felt their collective terror as, one by one, their leg bones shattered under precise sword strikes, leaving them helpless within the cultivator's ritual circles. The memories overlapped with her current reality until she could no longer tell which screams belonged to the past and which were her own.

The madman moved with the same mechanical precision she'd witnessed through their memories, his sword tip dragging through the dirt around her prone form. The blade left a perfect circle, the soil darkening as if responding to some malevolent energy. Her blood seeped outward, staining the earth crimson, creeping toward the boundary he'd drawn.

Through the chorus of remembered terror, Flint watched him begin the familiar pattern—walking the circle's edge, his sword drawing intricate patterns on the ground.

The symbols glowed with a faint blue hue, twisting and turning in mesmerizing patterns. They were the same symbols she'd seen through the memories of his previous victims, arcane characters that seemed to writhe with unnatural life.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

The reddish-brown light intensified, and the voices in her head screamed louder, recognizing the beginning of the ritual that had claimed their own souls. They had all laid exactly as she did now, watching helplessly as the cultivator prepared to tear their souls from their bodies. Their collective memory showed her what would come next—how the symbols would begin to glow, how the circle would become a prison, how their essence would be slowly, agonizingly extracted to feed whatever dark power had consumed this once-human cultivator.

The memories pressed against her consciousness with suffocating weight—mothers whose final thoughts were desperate prayers for their children's safety, fathers whose last breaths carried whispered names of their families, lovers whose dying moments were filled with images of faces they would never see again. And now, like them, Flint lay trapped within a perfect circle of her own blood, about to become another voice in the chorus of the damned.

The cultivator completed another symbol, and it flared with sickly light. His vacant eyes reflected the glow, and his lips moved in the same twisted incantations that had sealed the fates of so many before her. The air grew thick with the stench of dark spiritual energy, and the voices of the dead howled in anticipation of welcoming another soul to their eternal torment.

The voices echoed through Flint's mind, a cacophony of pain that threatened to shred her sanity. Though her body remained oddly numb to physical agony, her psyche burned with the collective torment of dozens of stolen souls. Their memories crashed against her consciousness like waves in a storm, each carrying fragments of lives brutally cut short.

"Why! WHY!" she screamed at the deranged cultivator, her voice raw with the same desperate question that had torn from so many throats before hers. The words seemed to ripple through the reddish-brown light surrounding them, causing it to flutter like disturbed water.

Her hand shot out, fingers closing around his left arm as he traced another symbol. The touch seemed to pierce through his madness for just a heartbeat – his clouded eyes cleared like a brief break in storm clouds, showing a flash of awareness. But the moment passed quickly, darkness flooding back as his lips moved mechanically.

"Because... cultivation..." he mumbled, his voice a discordant mixture of hunger and mechanical recitation. "Need... souls... advance... Adept..."

Flint's grip tightened, her fingers digging into the tattered sleeve of his cultivation robes. The interruption to his ritual seemed to trigger something in him – a programmed response to interference. His right hand jerked up, sword glinting as he brought it down toward her body. Even in his madness, his movements retained a terrible precision.

"Let... go..." he growled, the words struggling past his lips as if part of him was fighting against itself. "Can't... kill... need alive..."

The blade sang through the air with lethal grace, and the trapped souls' screams crescendoed in Flint's mind – a haunting chorus of final moments replayed in endless agony. Through their collective memory, she could anticipate the exact sensation: the whisper of steel parting fabric, the sharp kiss of metal against skin. Yet when the blade struck, it was as if she were watching it happen to someone else.

Her body registered the impact, the tearing of flesh, but the pain remained oddly distant – like a storm viewed through thick glass, visible but somehow removed from her immediate reality.

The anguish of the dead souls lashed at Flint's heart as she maintained her desperate grip on the deranged cultivator's left arm. She felt something warm trickling down her cheeks - tears she hadn't realized she was crying. In that moment, the familiar intangible force suddenly surged toward her with violent intensity, manifesting as white light that enveloped her entire body.

The luminescence blurred her vision, leaving her with only the sounds of the mad cultivator's wild sword swings and his agonized screams: "Too much! Too much!... Too much natural aura!"

Through the white haze before her eyes, an image of Sage South Rain materialized - dressed in tattered clothes, her usual elegance replaced by signs of hardship. Flint found herself extending a hand toward the vision, words falling unbidden from her lips: "Let's go." The scene changed suddenly, and a man appeared in front of her, holding her close. In the next moment, he was struck in the back by a sword wielded by someone behind him. She couldn't help but notice the angular and rugged features of the man's face, which strangely reminded her of Spark...

Then everything vanished.

The deranged cultivator exploded before her in a violent burst, showering her with blood and viscera that clung to her white Celestial Sword Sect robes like macabre decorations. His sword lay silent in the river of blood. The tortured voices in her mind fell silent, and she could feel the intangible force within her body expanding - as if the cultivator's soul had been transformed into the intangible force, feeding into her own essence.

The suffocating weight of the dead souls' memories began to fade, leaving behind an eerie stillness broken only by the soft patter of blood dripping from her soaked robes. As the reddish-brown light dissipated, the valley air felt cleaner somehow, as if purged of the dark aura that had permeated it moments before. Yet the price of this cleansing lay scattered around her in crimson droplets and fragments of what had once been a human being.

Her hands moved through the river of blood as she dragged herself toward the sword. Even through the crimson coating its surface, she could make out the Celestial Sword Sect's emblem - a distinctive cloud pattern etched into the blade.

As she lifted her gaze, a movement caught her eye. In the shadows, a slender dog watched her intently. Before she could focus on its features, the creature turned and bounded away. In that fleeting moment of its retreat, she glimpsed something unordinary - three tails streaming behind it like banners in the wind.

Then, from behind her, came a voice that made her heart skip: Spark.

With tremendous effort, Flint twisted her body around.

"Flint!" In an instant, Spark was on his knees beside her, pulling her into an embrace. As his face turned, the angle caught the light in a way that overlapped perfectly with the man from her vision, making her breath catch. Her head came to rest naturally on his shoulder, and she had an overwhelming urge to run her fingers through his hair - but the sight of her blood-soaked hands stopped her.

"Spark," she said softly, her voice barely above a whisper, "I'm covered in blood."

She could hear the tremor in his voice as he struggled to speak, his usual composure cracking. "Seedling said... she said you might have fallen to your death..."

A group of disciples led by Seedling rushed onto the scene, many wearing the distinctive robes of inner sect Adepts. Seedling's fox ears twitched as she immediately jumped to her own defense: "I never said Flint was dead! I only said she fell from a height! And there was this terrifying crazy cultivator chasing us!"

When Seedling spotted Flint in Spark's protective embrace, her eyes lit up with relief and joy. "Flint! You're alive!"

Having already convinced herself that Flint must be an Inferno Wolf like Spark - and quite possibly the wolf prince's girlfriend - Seedling held back, giving the pair their moment.

"Did you actually hope I was dead?" Flint quipped weakly.

Seedling chuckled, her eyes scanning the area. "Where's the crazy cultivator?"

Flint hesitated before answering, "He... sort of... exploded?"

Seedling's eyes widened to saucers. "Exploded?" Around them, the Adept-level disciples exchanged looks of disbelief.

Gently pushing against Spark's tight embrace, Flint gestured toward the blood-stained sword on the ground. "That sword - it's Celestial Sword Sect craftsmanship. The cultivator might have been one of us."

She paused, aware of the doubtful and shocked expressions surrounding her, then continued: "He was... absorbing souls. I felt them - all their painful memories."

"Soul absorption? That's a major crime against the Immortal Alliance! We must report this to Sage Mortius Crane immediately!" one Adept-level disciple called out dramatically, his voice cracking with excitement. The others bobbed their heads in enthusiastic agreement, creating a chorus of "Yes, yes!"

The group made their way back to the Celestial Sword Sect, with Spark carrying Flint in his arms. His black cultivation robes were now thoroughly stained with blood, but he seemed completely unbothered by it. His golden eyes, though, still bore telltale signs of recent tears - slightly red and glistening in the light.

"Were you crying?" Flint teased, a small smile playing at her lips.

"No," Spark replied with stubborn dignity, his chin lifting slightly even as he held her closer. But the slight quiver in his voice betrayed him.

The sight of the usually composed wolf prince carrying a blood-soaked Flint while adamantly denying his obvious tears drew subtle smiles from their companions. Even Seedling had to hide her grin behind her hand, her fox tail swishing with barely contained amusement at the pair's interaction.

"Say," Flint mused, her voice taking on a playful lilt despite her exhaustion, "do you think we might have met in a past life?"

"What are you talking about?" Spark's brows furrowed in that characteristic way of his, though his arms never loosened their protective hold. "In my twenty years, I've never met anyone... as strange as you."

Flint just smiled mysteriously and let it go with a soft "Never mind." But there was something in her eyes - a knowing look that made Spark's frown deepen even further, though not entirely in annoyance.

Behind them, Seedling's fox ears perked up with interest at this exchange. She opened her mouth as if to comment, then thought better of it, settling instead for an amused tail swish. After all, who was she to interrupt what was clearly a moment between the wolf prince and his definitely-not-just-a-friend?

The blood-soaked Flint being carried princess-style by an obviously-been-crying-but-won't-admit-it Spark made quite the picture as they made their way back to the sect. Some of the Adept disciples tried very hard not to stare - and failed spectacularly.