"Cough, cough cough cough, cough cough cough cough cough!"
Meng Chao had been awakened by the sound of his own coughing.
He had no idea how long he had been coughing.
He coughed until heaven and earth spun, until his heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys seemed ready to gush out from the depths of his throat, before he barely regained control of his body.
At least the excruciating pain radiating from every inch of his body told him that he was still alive.
His shattered soul took quite a while longer to barely piece itself back together in the depths of his brain matter.
After taking more than a dozen deep breaths and slightly suppressing the urge to spit blood, he clenched his loosened teeth and struggled to rise, dropping to one knee as he examined his injuries.
The good news was that he was still wearing Totem Armor.
The bad news was that the Totem Armor's combat performance had plummeted to rock bottom.
Not only had the totems on its surface become blurred and indistinct, but the places that had once gleamed brightly were now covered in blackened scars and crisscrossing, spiderweb-like cracks. Many of them could not be repaired in time by the quasi-Liquid Metal substance, and through those horrifying fissures, his torn and mangled wounds were visible.
The Totem Armor's operating system was directly feeding a flood of jumping information into his visual nerves, like an "artwork" scribbled out by a drunken madman. It told him that the Totem Armor had been "contaminated" by holy light and would require a long time and astronomical resources to be fully repaired.
Beneath the Totem Armor, Meng Chao's Spiritual Energy slowly coursed through his limbs and bones, quickly confirming that at least thirty to fifty of his bones had