The wind rose again.
It came with a chill sharper than before, whipping up grit that stung Wang Xian's face and body.
He lay on the cold sand, his bones feeling as though they had been scattered and his meridians as though that female demon had thrust her hand right through them.
A strange, dreadful aftertaste lingered in his chest.
The feel of those two hands, the clash between those two wills, remained etched deep in his senses.
A pitch-black demonic hand.
A palm of white jade.
One reaching out from his belly, the other probing out from his chest...
What were they? Why were they inside my body?
That Meng Po... those eighty-one palm strikes... that wisp of demonic soul... and the scroll Wuyue had given him, which had sent him back here.
Everything he had endured, every inexplicable horror, spun and collided like countless fragments in his aching, muddled mind.
Yet they refused to assemble into a complete answer, leaving only a chill behind.
He lay on the ground, gasping. Sand filled his nostrils, triggering even more violent coughs.
His vision blurred. Darkness surged toward him from all sides like a rising tide, ready to swallow him whole.
As he sank into the darkness, his unfocused gaze seemed to catch something far above and far away, deep within the writhing, torn-open vault of night.
A vague outline took shape: vast beyond measure, indistinct, wreathed in boundless, profound demonic energy...
As if separated by endless stretches of time and space, the outline quietly watched the great desert.
A tiny, dying ant.
Then endless darkness swallowed him completely.
The great desert returned to silence.
Only the sobbing wind remained, sweeping along the shifting sands as they slowly covered every trace of what had happened here.
Including the dreadful, sword-scar-like trench,