Blood trickled from the corners of Ji Li's mouth. At first glance, there was nothing on his chest, but now and then, the hideous crimson of a wedding dress showed through.
The pair of hands beneath the skin of his neck flickered in and out of sight, choking his throat and cutting off his air, yet they seemed like an illusion.
Everything seemed like an illusion, but death was all too real.
His consciousness was rapidly fading, leaving him very, very little time to think. Tonight, events were unfolding at an incredible pace, as though the Time Ghost feared something might change.
Even as the Ghost Heart's beating intensified, Ji Li remained remarkably calm. His gray-black pupils contracted slightly, but his gaze stayed steady.
By the distorted light of the dragon-and-phoenix candles, he lay flat in the coffin, staring into the air until a speck of dust caught his eye.
That speck should have been utterly insignificant, yet in the wavering candlelight, it stood out with startling clarity.
Stranger still was its position—one second, it hovered three inches in front of Ji Li's nose; the next, it abruptly appeared three inches beside his right ear.
There was no path of movement between the two positions. It was as though... the intervening process had been edited out.
Then there were the shadows the dragon-and-phoenix candles cast on the coffin's inner walls.
At times, they lengthened, stretching from the inner walls all the way to the coffin's bottom. At others, they abruptly shortened, retreating into the candlesticks themselves.
The shifts in light and shadow matched the dust's jumps exactly, as though the entire space had been divided into countless time fragments, with the objects in each fragment occupying different time nodes.
Ji Li's dying brain worked frantically...
*The dust was jumping... because