Pebbles were still raining down from overhead.
Chen Wuya did not look up. He merely held the drop of blood at his fingertip before the crack in the iron grating, utterly motionless. The expressions of the three descendants of the guardians changed again and again. Their hand seals tightened, yet the blue light seemed as if something had sunk its teeth into it, flickering bright and dim, pulsing unsteadily.
"What... exactly did you do?" one of them growled, his voice trembling.
Chen Wuya smiled. The corner of his eye twitched, and a line of blood seeped from his temple and slid down his cheek. He did not wipe it away. Instead, he licked the warm wetness at the corner of his lips—it was fresh blood welling from the gash in the hollow of his shoulder.
"I did nothing," he said. "You were just too eager."
As his words fell, he suddenly let go.
The blood droplet fell, striking the broken point in the rune without missing by a hair. In that instant, the Misaligned Practice Connects to Spirit system jolted violently within his sea of consciousness, and a line of phantom text appeared:
[Nonstandard energy injected. Logic collapse detected. Determined to be a system malfunction—backlash activated.]
The blue light on the iron grating suddenly surged backward like a reversing tide, shooting straight into the palms of the three men. They all let out muffled groans, their arms shuddering as their hand seals shattered on the spot. One dropped to his knees, clutching his chest as he coughed up a mouthful of black blood. The other two staggered back, their faces shifting from red to white, then to ashen gray.
The rhythm of the mechanisms fell into complete chaos.
The gap in the iron grating had originally shrunk to