A bone-piercing chill seeped through his soaked clothes and into his skin. Calon shuddered violently, his Chaos-clouded consciousness gradually clearing as though ice were breaking apart.
He tried to raise a hand to wipe the water from his face, only to find his limbs tightly bound by thick alloy chains. The chains had sunk deep into his flesh, and the slightest struggle sent piercing pain through him.
He had been tied into a tightly wrapped "meat dumpling," able only to curl up miserably on the freezing metal floor. Every breath brought a dull ache from his compressed chest.
"Awake?"
A cool, detached voice sounded from ahead, like an ice blade in the dead of winter, scraping painfully against Calon's eardrums.
He laboriously lifted his heavy head, his blurred vision gradually focusing—on a high platform not far away stood a man clad in a white robe.
The fabric was soft and lustrous, gleaming delicately beneath the gentle lights. It accentuated the man's upright, pine-straight figure, while his brows and eyes carried an elegant, otherworldly air, like a banished immortal who had stepped from an ancient painting.
Calon's expression instantly became complicated, jealousy creeping into his heart like a venomous snake.
He subconsciously touched the crisscrossing scars on his face, then remembered the wife who had run off with Old Wang from next door.
If he had possessed such handsome features, if he had been a little less bandit-like and a little more refined, would his wife not have left him?
But that thought lasted only an instant before it was driven away by the bottomless chill in the man's eyes.
Those eyes were too terrifying. The ink-black pupils held not a trace of warmth, as though they could see through the deepest secrets in a person's heart. They were also like