The wound under Chen Mo's ribs felt as though a glowing red coal had been jammed into it, and his left eye felt as if it had been pierced by a steel needle and churned a few times over. Curled up on the freezing wooden bed with the Heart-Clearing Jade Essence pressed against his scorching eyelids, he was tortured by the alternating torment of ice and fire and failed to close his eyes the entire night. The moment the sky outside the window began to turn a pale, fish-belly white, he scrambled up. The movement strained his wound, making him grimace in pain, but he could not afford to care. Hurriedly throwing on his clothes, he scooped up the tattered copy of the *Sword Observation Manual* and the stack of doodled Xuan paper from the table, then stumbled toward the Sword Pavilion.
Atop Yaochi Peak in the early morning, the biting gales cut like blades. Chen Mo walked with unsteady steps, his left eye's field of vision swirling in a mottled grayish-blue. Everything he looked at seemed smeared behind a layer of greasy, frosted glass, and several times he nearly tumbled into the ditches along the path. The tattered silk manuscript pressed against his chest ached fiercely, yet it felt like cradling a red-hot branding iron, burning him with panic—the sheer terror of the demonic phantom lunging from the page last night, and the bizarre way the manuscript had burst with brilliant light to obliterate the demonic glow, were still fresh in his mind. Without clearing this up, he feared tha…
Chapter 77