To put it aptly, that could no longer be considered a "person."
From afar, he looked like a skeleton—a skeleton wrapped in nothing but a layer of dark skin. There seemed to be not a shred of flesh anywhere on his body, yet it appeared exceptionally taut.
More vividly put, he resembled a piece of air-dried cured meat.
The clothes wrapped around that "skeleton" had long since faded from the passage of time. Or perhaps they had always been a grimy gray. They were riddled with tears and tattered beyond measure.
White bandages for treating wounds were wrapped around the skeleton's arms, breastbone, thighs, and other areas. Faintly, one could still make out traces of blood that had dried and been weathered away by the years.
Those white strips of cloth showed beyond the tattered gray garments, making the skeleton appear somewhat miserable and steeped in the vicissitudes left behind by time.
The skeleton sat leaning against the cliff face, its head slightly bowed, looking as though it were deep in thought and meditation.
His sharply defined face, as though carved by blades and axes, bore features so gaunt they made one's heart ache.
Within those sunken eye sockets was a pair of hollow, dim gray eyes, like those unique to an elderly man at death's door—utterly lifeless.
Yet those very eyes were so deep that a single glance sent terror rising from the depths of one's heart. It was as though they possessed some dreadful magic capable of devouring a person alive, flesh by flesh.
This gaunt, bone-thin figure sat there silently in a contemplative posture. No one knew how many years he had remained seated there. Judging from the weathering of the black Saber Sheath standing beside him, it had been at least ten years.
Tang Yuan found