When the doors were blasted open, the entire hall shuddered.
Mo Feng stumbled inside, his knees smashing heavily against the stone floor. He pushed himself up on one elbow and scrambled to his feet. Clutched in his arms was a bronze disc, its edges streaked with dark red blood. Ignoring his own injuries, he lunged straight for the heart of the formation, spread the star map open, and pressed it over the cracks in the runes.
Chen Wuya was still kneeling on the ground. The blood from his seven orifices had only just stopped, and his breaths were shallow yet heavy. He looked up at Mo Feng, his throat working, but no sound came out.
Mo Feng drew a slender mechanism key from his waist. His fingers trembled violently, yet he steadily inserted it into the groove at the center of the star map. Then he turned to Chen Wuya's palm. The Reverse Scale fragment was embedded in his flesh, the blood around it already dried.
"It has to come out," he said.
Chen Wuya did not object. Mo Feng reached out and gently pulled. The instant the fragment left his flesh, blue light flashed across the star map. The seven stars of the Big Dipper emerged over the disc, but their paths were skewed, the third star noticeably displaced.
"The Tianquan Star is wrong." Mo Feng stared at its position. "Someone altered it."
Gritting his teeth, he seized the star lines with both hands and yanked hard. The bronze disc let out a piercing screech of metal grinding against metal as the seven stars began to shift. The dragon maiden suddenly rushed forward, raising her hand to strike his hands away.
"Stop!"
Mo Feng tilted his head aside to evade her, but his movements did not stop. The final