Beyond Scene Tremor

Who am I?

Where am I?

What happened?

Ji Jue lay face down on the ground, his vision blackening in waves. Every inch of him hurt, from head to toe...

Only after a long while did he catch his breath. He reached out and pushed against the ground, but failed to get up.

After another attempt, he realized his arms seemed to be pointing the wrong way. He fumbled around for a while before discovering that his face had been twisted around toward his backside...

Minor problem.

With a crack, he twisted it back into place, tilted his head to pour the blood out of his ears and the water out of his brain, then deftly switched into rebirth form and began repairs.

[Severe damage]

From his head to his heels, scarcely a single part of him remained intact.

Fortunately, it only looked a little gruesome. A few repairs, patches, welds, and reconnections, a couple of cycles of Three-Phase Alchemy, and he was instantly reborn at full health.

Only Embers could pull off such a bizarre method of healing.

A momentary crushing defeat could not discourage him. Quite the opposite—if he had actually won, Ji Jue would have suspected that Mirror and Heart Pivot had gotten to him!

Ugh, Heart Pivot is so nasty!

Our Embers is much better.

There was no shame in losing to his own teacher; that was only natural. Losing to Old Lou would have been the sky falling.

What interested him more was... how he had lost.

[Isis, replay the recording.]

His eyes lit up. The footage of that brief instant appeared before him and began looping. Even slowed to its limit, it still felt insufficient, so Ji Jue simply activated the Aether lineage blessing within Chun Jun, reproducing the recording and projecting