Before him, on the wooden bed, a figure leaned against the headboard.
She still wore that ancient outfit of black fabric embroidered with golden patterns, her long hair cascading over her shoulders. Her features were so perfect they seemed beyond mortal beauty. It was Feng Qingyao.
Yet at this moment, her peerlessly beautiful face was utterly bloodless, pale as the finest porcelain, while also covered in a fine exhaustion that seemed to seep out from within.
Faint traces of red lay beneath her skin, winding through it with a pitiful, innocent fragility.
Those deep eyes that had once seemed to contain an endless starry sky had dimmed considerably. Her lids drooped slightly, and her long lashes cast faint shadows over her pale skin.
Most shocking of all was the state of her body.
Starting from her left shoulder blade, a horrifying slash wound that seemed condensed from the purest darkness ran diagonally downward all the way to her right waist.
Shen Yi's gaze sharpened at once.
Because he could sense that it was no ordinary flesh wound. It had sunk deeply into her body and was still eroding her even now.
There were no signs of flesh regenerating within the wound. Instead, two utterly different forces were madly colliding, intertwining, and annihilating one another.
On one side was Feng Qingyao's own vast, ancient, tenacious power of rules, giving off a faint golden glow like an unyielding dam resisting the corrosion with all its might. On the other was a dense, inky power of black fog origin, steeped in chaos and deathly stillness. It writhed and surged like a living thing, trying to break through the rules' blockade and completely pollute and devour everything.
The battle between the two forces continued silently and brutally within the wound. Every tiny collision made