"It's not pressing on it."
Yun Qingyue firmly pressed down the tape. Her fingers lingered for a moment on his lower back.
"Then endure it."
She packed up the medicine box but did not leave. Dragging a chair to the bedside, she sat down.
The medicine box rested on her knees, open, its medicine bottles lined up in neat rows.
She began mixing the medicine. The pestle ground against the mortar, rustle, rustle, rustle. Just like countless times before.
Lu Chen lay facedown on the bed, listening to the sound of the pestle.
Wave after wave of pain surged up from his tailbone, each one a little higher than the last.
The skin at the wound was slowly being pushed apart from within by the tailbone. He could feel each strand of skin fiber snapping—not pain, but pulling.
As though someone had pinched a small patch of skin on his lower back and was slowly, relentlessly pulling it outward.
The pestle sounded through the entire night.
At daybreak, Yun Qingyue removed the bandages from his lower back.
The wound was twice as large as it had been that night. The exposed tip of the tailbone had grown from the size of a grain of rice to the size of a soybean.
The golden bone gleamed faintly in the morning light. Fine patterns had already appeared on it—identical to those on the Dragon-Pattern Spirit Bones.
She cleaned the skin around the wound, reapplied Dragon Blood Ointment, and changed the bandages. Her movements were gentle, but his body still tensed.
"Today will hurt more than yesterday. The bone grows fastest on the second day."
She was right.
On the second night, Lu Chen did not sleep for even a single moment.
The tailbone's outward growth suddenly accelerated. It grew from soybean-sized to