"How long can your Dao heart hold out?"
Lai Te's palm settled on Liu Yan's shoulder once more, his fingers slowly tightening, the heat in his palm searing like a branding iron.
Inch by inch, it crushed the last remaining outline of her chest.
Fracture lines spread downward from her shoulder, every crack splitting open.
Each one released a wisp of golden Dao Fire ash, like a dying candle flame repeatedly teased by the wind.
Liu Yan lay sprawled on the gray-white ground, her forehead pressed against cold rubble, her disheveled hair plastered to her cheeks by sweat.
Her vision had already begun to blur. Everything before her seemed separated by a gauze curtain burned full of holes, and she could only vaguely make out Lai Te's boots, stained with golden ash.
Both her arms had been utterly shattered, and her legs had long since vanished earlier.
All she had left was half a ruined body and a heart that still beat faintly.
But the pain was growing distant.
She felt her consciousness like a pool of water, slowly drying up from all sides toward the center.
The memories of laws she had cultivated for countless years, the combat instincts carved into her bones, the flashes of enlightenment and rebirth born alongside the Law of Flame.
They were like sheets of paper covered in writing cast into a fire.
Their edges curled and blackened, turning to ash. With every sheet that vanished, a part of her self was stripped away with it.
Yet in the deepest depths of that ever-shrinking pond of consciousness, there was a speck of light.
That light was tiny and dim, hidden at the end of her heart meridians, on the reverse side of the Dao-heart seed, like an old seal forgotten in a corner.
It