Sweat suddenly poured out, instantly soaking his hair. It ran down his temples, over his cheekbones, over his jaw, and dripped onto the tabletop one drop at a time.
His blue robe, soaked through with sweat, clung tightly to his body.
Suddenly, Yan Hui bit down hard and tore open his lip.
The instant his teeth cut into flesh, a thread of blood welled out, its salty-sweet tang bursting across his mouth.
The pain was like a bolt of lightning, violently splitting apart his muddled consciousness.
In that instant, Yan Hui seemed to come to his senses!
His pupils suddenly contracted, focus returning as everything before him sharpened from a blur... his master's trembling body, the cold porridge in the earthen jar, the dying embers in the stove.
But at the very instant the blood emerged, the demon lying dormant within his body woke up.
It was something indescribable, as though an ancient ferocious beast hidden within his soul had suddenly awakened.
With a primal, brutal, irresistible force, it surged upward and let out a roar that only he could hear!
That roar made his eardrums ache, churned his organs, and nearly forced him to double over and vomit.
Amid a pained roar, a trace of greed appeared in Yan Hui's eyes.
That greed was not his—at least, not that of the Yan Hui he knew.
It was like something that had crawled out of another abyss, using his eyes to look outside, hungrily, madly, desperately extending invisible tentacles toward the world beyond.
Within that greed was hunger... hunger for something he could not name.
Like a riverbed dry for a thousand years yearning for a torrential rain; within that greed was excitement... the sickening excitement of a predator locking onto its prey.
There was fear within that greed as