The drums had stopped, but the air had not grown any lighter.
Chen Wuya still sat three zhang outside the courtyard, palm turned upward as golden threads slowly crept beneath his skin like a spiderweb. When that giant maw formed from toxic mist had struck the barrier, he had sensed a trace of energy flowing in reverse—not mere poison, but something laced with rhythmic vibrations, like a heartbeat, or the fading echo of an incantation. He did not move. He merely sank his Misaligned Force into his liver meridian and reverse-calculated the trajectory of that instant's fluctuations.
Bai Zhi stood at the southeastern corner, her sword tip slightly lowered. The sapphire sword tassel was no longer hot, yet she still did not dare relax. Several refugees lay unconscious on the ground, blue veins throbbing across their faces as though something were tearing at their minds from within. Her gaze skimmed over them before shifting toward the ridgeline—seven ghostly green flames still burned there, though no longer in neat formation. Two of them swayed faintly, as if hesitating.
Chen Wuya suddenly raised a hand, his fingertip tracing the meridians along his left arm. A faint golden radiance traveled upward in reverse from his wrist, passed over his shoulder, and finally poured into a hidden meridian at the back of his neck. A system interface silently appeared:
[Composite voodoo energy detected. Recommended: activate "Misaligned Practice Connects to Spirit: Reverse Poison" module.]
He closed his eyes and murmured, "Not recommended... Execute."
In an instant, a cicada-wing-thin layer of golden light spread around him. It was not dazzling, but the edges of the nearby mist warped faintly. A wisp of lingering poison tried to crawl through a crack in the ground toward his feet. The moment it touched the edge of his