The warmth at the seventh hollow on the sole of his foot had not faded. Instead, it spread upward along his meridians, like a living thread slithering beneath his skin. Chen Wuya lowered his head to look at his right hand. The crack in his palm still glimmered with golden light, its edges slightly raised. Yet it no longer hurt; instead, it carried a swelling sensation, as though something had been awakened.
He neither moved nor spoke, merely staring at the floating scroll. It hovered silently at the center of the platform, golden light flowing over it like breath, as if awaiting a gesture, an answer.
"What happened to your hand?" Bai Zhi's voice came from beside him, tighter than before.
Mo Feng had not yet caught his breath. The fingers of the hand braced against the wall suddenly clenched, and the folding fan slid half an inch from his palm. Staring at the crack in Chen Wuya's hand, his lips trembled. "Don't touch it... that is the Fate-Bearing Pact."
"What pact?" Chen Wuya finally spoke, his voice low and hoarse.
"The Heavenly Machine Scroll recognizes only one person." Mo Feng looked up, his gaze unfocused. "Only those connected by bloodline and bound by fate can display the mark before touching it. But it shouldn't be you... Our family has guarded it for eight hundred years. No outsider has ever been able to trigger a resonance."
Before his words had faded, a torrent suddenly exploded in Chen Wuya's mind.
It was neither sound nor image, but countless martial paths unfurling in an instant—the incomplete meridian diagram of the Canglang Art automatically filled itself in; the Governing Vessel Meridian's originally broken reverse-rush route unexpectedly formed a closed loop with the Hand Jueyin Pericardium Meridian. The Qingfeng Sword Sect's "Thirteen Forms" began