Ye Feng propped himself up, his knuckles turning white as his bones emitted a faint, cracking sound in the silence. He stared fixedly at the icy, watery trails winding across his palm. Those tiny ice crystals were slowly evaporating in a defying manner, refracting an eerie blue glow under the moonlight. Every single droplet seemed to carry the biting chill of millennia-old glacial ice, yet inside his meridians, it transformed into a raging Karmic Fire that burned hot enough to make his viscera feel as though they were boiling.
"Youning..." The murmur escaping his throat was shredded by the night wind. He raised a hand to press against his throbbing temple, his mind once again conjuring the outline of the young woman steeped in moonlight at the moment of parting—her fluttering plain robes, the frost clinging to her eyelashes, and the fleeting warmth between her lips. That was by no means an illusion; the lingering cold cedar fragrance on the tips of his hair still lingered at the tip of his nose.
The ground suddenly trembled violently. Ye Feng staggered and grabbed a cracked corridor pillar, thick black fog oozing from the gaps between the bluestone bricks, with all vegetation withering wherever it passed. In the distance came the sharp sound of chains snapping, and the inscriptions on the eighteen soul-suppressing pillars grew dim simultaneously; some terrifying existence that had lain dormant for a millennium was awakening.
Chapter 24