Chen Wuya's fingers were still pressed against the wet mud print, and that fishy stench burrowed from his fingertips into his nostrils. He did not move. He kept his breathing extremely low, his eyes locked on the fork in the path three zhang away. The fog had grown thicker than before, yet that silhouette remained where it was, crouched low like a dead branch laid across the stone.
He slowly withdrew his hand. A little black mud clung to his palm; he rubbed it onto his trouser leg without wiping it clean. His left hand gradually slid to his chest, where the edge of the heart-protecting mirror pressed into his flesh. The bronze surface was strangely warm, as though it had been heated by his body for a long time.
At that very instant, the shadow moved.
It did not pounce or leap. Like ash swept up by a gust of wind, it skimmed across the ground toward him. It was so fast that its path was nearly invisible; all he felt was darkness before his eyes as bone-chilling cold rushed straight at his face.
Chen Wuya instinctively swept his sword across, its edge cutting through empty air and blocking nothing. Yet that cold surged backward along the blade, boring into the meridians in his wrist. The true qi within him suddenly stalled, as though something had clutched his pulse gate.
His heart tightened, and he immediately retreated half a step. As his left foot pushed off, loose stones slipped beneath it. In the instant his balance faltered, the heart-protecting mirror suddenly burned hot, as if answering some kind of summons.
A thought exploded into his mind—Canglang Art, that fragmentary passage. There was a route that should have flowed from the Shanzhong Acupoint into the dantian, but once, while training,