Ren Tianxiong began coughing violently as he spoke.
With every cough, his chest caved deeply inward, and the outlines of his heart and lungs stood out clearly beneath his paper-thin, deathly pale skin.
His coughing was so violent that Meng Chao and Shen Yuanbao suspected he might shake his heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys to pieces and cough them all out.
Without question, this was not caused by the injuries he had just suffered.
It was the total eruption of hidden injuries that had accumulated inside him for decades.
"I have 'Type 41 Specific Immune System Deficiency Syndrome.'"
Ren Tianxiong spoke calmly.
Meng Chao and Shen Yuanbao's pupils suddenly contracted.
Just as Ren Tianxiong had said moments ago.
There was no such thing as a free lunch.
Every kind of power came at a price.
Transcendents possessed the ability to move mountains and drain seas, to turn heaven and earth upside down.
But as they broke through the limits of life time and again, they also battered life's stability time and again. One misstep, and they could easily contract all manner of bizarre diseases that ordinary people could never imagine.
Genetic mutation had always been an extraordinarily risky affair.
Out of a hundred mutations, often only one counted as "evolution"; the other ninety-nine were degeneration or even deformity.
Type 41 Specific Immune System Deficiency Syndrome was an incurable disease that Transcendents—especially powerhouses above the Heaven Realm—were highly susceptible to.
Put simply, after long periods of cultivation and repeated bombardment by Spiritual Energy, a Transcendent's cells mutated until they became utterly unrecognizable, to the point where even their own immune system could no longer identify them.
When the immune system mistakenly regarded these mutated cells as foreign "invaders,"
it would naturally launch attacks against them.
This left the Transcendent in