Strength Advances Again, Looking Forward to Future Challenges

The night wind swept over the dunes, snapping his robes in the gale. Chen Wuya still stood where he was, the fingers of his left hand clamped around his sword hilt. The fissure in his palm throbbed as though some living thing were crawling beneath his skin. The gray-gold force that had surged backward into his shoulder socket had yet to dissipate; instead, it drifted slowly through the depths of his meridians like a dormant snake.

Bai Zhi stood at his side, her gaze resting on his lowered right hand. Veins bulged across the back of it, his fingertips trembling faintly. Tiny beads seeped from the edges of the blood scab—not sweat, but true energy overflowing and condensing into dew.

She said nothing. She merely laid her flexible sword across the crook of her arm and gently placed her left hand against the nape of his neck. A thread of cool, crystalline sword intent entered through his acupoints, like a stream flowing through a dried riverbed.

Chen Wuya sharply inhaled, his body going rigid. The Misaligned Force raging chaotically within him was stirred by that chill and unexpectedly began to whirl, circling through the hidden corners of the eight extraordinary meridians. Barriers that had once been impossible to cross were now forcibly gouged open by this chaotic power.

"Don't suppress it," Bai Zhi said softly. "Let it move on its own."

He gritted his teeth as a line of blood ran down from his temple. This was not a breakthrough. It was a tearing apart. Every meridian was enduring pressure it had never known before, as if countless needles were piercing outward from within. But he knew that if he withdrew his force now, the Misaligned Force would flood back into his dantian. At best, his cultivation would be crippled;