Cold flesh and blood began to produce clumps of eerie Black Water, repairing his severed throat and shattered heart meridians.
Shen Shouxing's limbs began to twitch irregularly. His flesh seemed to be tugged by gray threads, writhing continuously before finally fusing completely.
Shen Shouxing slowly rose to his feet in a bizarre posture.
His eyes turned a deep, heavy black.
A faint, eerie smile also curled at the corners of his lips.
A hoarse, tearing voice rang out in the deathly silent Divine Temple, as though the voices of countless men, women, old people, and children had been mixed together.
"You old bastards guarded it so tightly..."
"But I finally... got in..."
"The chessboard in Gan Province... cannot take another piece, so... I'll open a new game..."
The black blood on Shen Shouxing's body soaked through his clothes, making him look as though he wore a dead man's daoist robe.
Taking one deep step and one shallow step, he walked to Shentu Ao's side. Dipping his fingers in his own black blood, he began to draw Array Patterns.
For a moment, hundreds upon thousands of overlapping shadows manifested upon the dead man's daoist robe.
The black blood beneath Shen Shouxing's fingers seemed to come alive, each portion writhing and winding across Shentu Ao's flayed flesh, forming one Ghostly Pattern after another.
And the Ghostly Patterns pieced together happened to form a dragon as well.
This dragon was a Black Dragon. It resembled the Azure Dragon of the Great Wilderness, yet it carried an indescribable profundity and eerie strangeness.
A torn, overlapping, uncanny voice sounded:
"You are a prince of the Great Wilderness. You will not die..."
"You will return to the Great Wilderness and accomplish your great undertaking, ruling all races with supreme Authority, suppressing all demons with the might