Jien drifted in a sea of agony and chaos.
The force that had erupted from the bronze disk rampaged through his body like molten lava, yet it carried with it the chilling stillness of death. It tore through his meridians, clashing violently with his own frail and gentle spiritual energy. Fire and ice, life and death, collided within him, ripping at every fiber of his being.
He felt as if his body were about to rupture from the inside out, every cell screaming in torment. The pain was worse than the near-fatal strike he had once suffered from Feng Tianyu.
Just as his mind teetered on the edge of collapse, something stirred in his chest. The silk scroll of Samadhi True Flame—that ancient manual he carried—grew faintly warm.
The cryptic archaic script and esoteric diagrams, normally indecipherable like the words of heaven itself, suddenly flared to life in his mind. Broken fragments of mantra and cultivation pathways surged unbidden into his thoughts:
"The heart holds the sovereign fire, the kidneys the minister fire, the dantian the fire of the people… gather the three flames in the cauldron, and burn away illusion…"
"Draw calamity into the body, temper bone and sinew, reverse the flow of the meridians, only then behold the true flame…"
These fragments of incantation intertwined with the rampaging alien energy, shaping it, redirecting it. The destructive tide seemed to find a crude channel, a savage path to run through. No longer blind, it roared like a river breaking a dam, scouring and gouging his meridians open.
The process was agony beyond words. It was as if red-hot irons were reshaping his veins and arteries, branding fire into his very marrow. Yet amid the torment, something miraculous occurred: the channels of his qi—damaged and clogged from his earlier wounds—were being forced wide open. Even hidden, neglected tributaries of energy were being violently carved into existence.
Time dissolved into pain. At last, the alien power seemed to exhaust itself. What remained coiled in his dantian, condensing into a faint whirl of energy. It was weak, but its nature was unnatural—icy cold and searing hot at once, like a flame that both burned and froze.
With a ragged cough, Jien spat out several mouthfuls of dark blood and finally stirred back to consciousness.
Darkness enveloped him. His body was drenched in sweat, his robes clinging to him like a burial shroud. The sensation of imminent rupture was gone, replaced by a profound weakness—and yet, beneath it, an uncanny sense of clarity, a faint widening of the channels within.
His trembling hand fumbled for the torch. With effort, he struck a spark. Firelight once more spread across the cavern.
The skeleton still sat silently, hands locked in its ancient mudra. The carvings in the stone remained unchanged. The bronze disk lay inert in his palm, lifeless and cool, as if the horrors of moments ago had never happened.
But the blood pooled on the ground, the scorch of pain etched into his body—those proved the ordeal had been real.
"This disk… and the Samadhi True Flame…" Jien's heart quivered. The two were linked—yet how? The disk's alien force had triggered the ancient art, though in a way more perilous than anything described.
He bowed respectfully to the skeleton, wary of disturbing further mysteries, and hastened out of the cave.
By the time he emerged, the rain had ceased. A faint glow of dawn bled into the mist.
Inspecting himself, he found that the wound on his back had torn open completely during the ordeal. Yet instead of bleeding freely, the flesh had cauterized in a strange way, blackened at the edges as though seared by fire. Within his core, his qi pulsed stronger, but its texture had changed—bearing that same dual nature, both freezing and blazing.
Blessing or curse, he could not tell. But at the very least… he was still alive.