The price Long Jingtian paid for doing all this for Xue Zihan was a severe loss of strength, from which he would take a long time to recover.
Otherwise, as the lord of the East Sea, even if someone like Niu Tongtian had laid an ambush for him, why would he need to transform into his true form just to crush these insignificant clowns, leaving himself gravely wounded?
Nor would he have fallen to the point of fighting this lowly human in such a desperate battle.
But in Long Jingtian's eyes, none of that mattered.
What truly mattered was that he had separated a fragment of his demon core's essence. That made his life bound to Xue Zihan's, and the two of them could sense each other.
That was also why Xue Zihan refused to leave the Demon Domain with Xu Yi. With this inescapable bond between them, she could never get away from Long Jingtian.
It was because of that same bond that she could say with such certainty that Long Jingtian had not died in Niu Tongtian's ambush, and that she could sense in time when Long Jingtian arrived at Jingfa Hall.
Long Jingtian could never have imagined that someone like this could exist in the world—that Xue Zihan would give up her own life for him.
As Xue Zihan dispersed her spirit, her soul began to decay, and her physical body died instantly. The fragment of demon-core essence hidden in the demon Origin Palace immediately vanished.
That fragment was the life essence of the demon core inside Long Jingtian. He could not afford to lose it.
The moment the demon-core essence inside Xue Zihan died, his own demon core lost its vitality, and the process of death began.
Despair became grief, and grief quickly turned into boundless