Spirit Eyes

"What's wrong with my eyes... I can see things so clearly."

Lin Yi sat on the stone bed, blinking once, then again. This was not vision a normal person should have.

He raised a hand and looked down at his bandaged chest.

White linen strips were wrapped around it layer upon layer, faint medicinal stains seeping through them.

He had only meant to check how well his wound had healed, but his gaze passed through the linen.

Then through the layer of ointment beneath it, then the skin, flesh, and fascia. Layer by layer, they turned transparent before his eyes, until the slowly beating heart within his chest and the ribs supporting his ribcage lay plainly exposed.

He could even see the fine patterns on the surface of his bones and the paths of the blood vessels clinging to them.

"Hiss—" Lin Yi sucked in a sharp breath and blinked hard several times.

He shifted his gaze to his left hand.

The same sight appeared again. Skin faded away, flesh blurred, and bone was revealed in perfect clarity.

The cracks in his finger bones appeared vividly before his eyes. Even the jagged edges of the bone fragments were visible down to the slightest detail.

"X-ray vision...?"

Disbelief colored Lin Yi's voice.

He turned his head, sweeping his gaze toward a farther corner of the stone house.

A flying insect the size of a sesame seed hovered in midair, its wings vibrating at an astonishing frequency.

Yet in Lin Yi's eyes, every flap of those wings played out as slowly as frame by frame, the veins in their membranes clear enough to count.

"Dynamic vision!"

His heartbeat abruptly quickened.

A strange instinct surged up within him. He circulated the thin layer of qi and blood in his body and slowly guided it toward his eyes.

Fine white-gold Divine Markings silently emerged across the surface of his eyeballs! Delicate as spiderwebs, they spread outward from the edges of his pupils, covering the entire surface of his eyes.

At the same time, something he had never seen before appeared in his field of vision.

Countless tiny specks of light floated through the air. They were incomparably small, drifting steadily and slowly from every direction toward his forehead before merging into his brain.

Spiritual energy.

Those particles were spiritual energy.

He saw with his own eyes the entire process of spiritual energy being absorbed by his brain, every particle's trajectory crystal clear.

Lin Yi slowly lowered his hand. The faint white-gold gleam in his eyes quietly receded, and the Divine Markings vanished with it.

He sat quietly on the stone bed for a moment, sorting through every change he had observed.

X-ray vision, dynamic tracking ability, spiritual energy vision.

These clearly had not come from the Savage Bull Diagram or the Savage Bull Art.

"...All right." He grinned and muttered, "After my brain awakened, my eyes awakened too."

After giving it some thought, he named this newly awakened ability Spirit Eyes.

Simple and straightforward. Anyone could tell at a glance that it had something to do with eyes.

Once the thought settled, something suddenly occurred to him.

"Brother Biao!" Lin Yi sprang off the bed. A sharp pain in his chest made him bare his teeth, but he had no time to care about that.

Biao's left hand had been shattered by a single claw strike from the Inkshadow Leopard when the wolf pack surrounded them. Lin Yi had clearly heard the sound of bones breaking. For that kind of comminuted fracture, he was the only one in the entire tribe who could treat it.

He threw on an outer robe, pushed open the stone house door, and hurried through the tribe's dirt roads beneath the night sky to the village chief's stone house. "Village Chief! Village Chief!"

An oil lamp was soon lit inside the stone house, and the door was pulled open from within.

The village chief wore an old outer robe. Drawing close, he looked Lin Yi over several times from head to toe. "You're awake, kid? How does your body feel?"

"It's nothing serious. A few days of rest will do." Lin Yi caught his breath. "Where's Brother Biao?"

The village chief's expression turned solemn. "His other external injuries have been treated, but only you can set the bones in his left arm. Can you do it in your condition?"

"I can. Let's go."

The two hurried to Biao's home.

Inside the stone house, Xiao Hu's mother sat beside the bed with reddened eyes. She clutched a wet cloth in one hand and gently wiped the sweat and blood from Biao's forehead.

Xiao Hu lay by the bedside, unusually quiet. His small hands gripped the edge of the bed, his unblinking eyes fixed on his father's pale, unconscious face.

"Village Chief, Xiao Lin." Seeing them enter, Xiao Hu's mother hurriedly rose to greet them, her voice tight. "You're here... Biao still hasn't woken up."

"Xiao Lin woke up and came to set Biao's bones," the village chief said.

"Good, good. Come, then." The woman hurriedly moved aside.

Xiao Hu also ran quickly to Lin Yi's side. Tilting up his little face, eyes red-rimmed, he spoke in a voice desperately holding back tears. "Brother Lin... you have to save my father."

Lin Yi bent down and rubbed Xiao Hu's head, gentler than usual. "Don't worry. Leave it to me."

He walked to the bedside, sat down, and reached for Biao's left forearm.

That arm had been crudely secured with coarse linen strips. Through the gaps, its clearly unnatural angle could be seen.

Lin Yi had intended to use qi and blood to examine the damage inside before beginning, but the moment he raised his hand, Spirit Eyes activated on its own.

In his vision, the linen vanished. The skin vanished. Muscle and fascia turned transparent layer by layer, revealing the ulna and radius broken into several sections.

Sharp bone fragments lay displaced and stacked over one another. Several tiny splinters floated free amid the soft tissue, while blood had pooled around the broken surfaces.

He could even clearly see the qi and blood flowing through Biao's left arm. Dark-red energy slowly wriggled along the remaining meridians, moving far more slowly than it would in a healthy person.

Spirit Eyes was faster, more accurate, and more intuitive than his qi-and-blood examination.

A thought stirred in Lin Yi's heart. Used for healing, this talent was practically like equipping him with a microscope and an X-ray machine.

He did not hesitate further. His right palm gently pressed against both sides of Biao's forearm, and threads of qi and blood extended from his palm, precisely winding around the first broken bone.

Guided by Spirit Eyes, he no longer needed to rely on touch to search for the position of every fragment. He simply "watched" as he moved them back into place.

One piece. Two pieces. Three pieces.

The shattered ulna was realigned, its fractured surfaces fitting together seamlessly.

The whole process was smooth and swift. Every bone fragment was like a carefully arranged building block, returning to its proper place one by one under the pull of his qi and blood.

In less than half the time it had taken him to set Falcon's bones last time, he finished the entire procedure.

Lin Yi withdrew his hand and let out a long breath. "Done."

The village chief immediately stepped forward and swiftly wrapped the thin wooden splints and linen strips prepared beforehand around Biao's left arm, securing it from elbow to wrist. Every fracture site was firmly locked in place.

"Thank you, Brother Lin!" Xiao Hu pounced forward and hugged Lin Yi's leg.

"Thank you, Xiao Lin..." Xiao Hu's mother thanked him again and again, her trembling voice carrying the relief of someone who had escaped a calamity.

"It's only right. Brother Biao saved my life. What I did was nothing." Lin Yi patted Xiao Hu's head, but as he straightened, his body swayed slightly.

He had just expended much of the little qi and blood he had left. Coupled with his own injuries not having fully recovered, a powerful wave of exhaustion now surged over him.

The village chief noticed his condition and quickly spoke up. "I'll watch over things here. Go back and rest right away. Don't force yourself."

Lin Yi nodded and did not stand on ceremony.

After bidding farewell to Xiao Hu and his mother, he turned and left the stone house, slowly making his way back to his own home along the moonlit dirt road.

Back in the stone house, he shut the door, dropped onto the stone bed, and exhaled a long breath of stale air.

Though his body was exhausted, his mind was unexpectedly clear.

He looked down at his hands, then at the objects in the darkened room that he could see with perfect clarity. The corners of his mouth unconsciously curved upward.

"Spirit Eyes." Muttering to himself, he circulated that current of qi and blood toward his eyes once more. White-gold Divine Markings emerged again, and the glowing particles of spiritual energy returned to his vision.

"It can not only see through flesh, track movement, and observe the flow of spiritual energy... When I set Brother Biao's bones just now, I also clearly saw the route and speed of the qi and blood flowing through his body."

Lin Yi's eyes glimmered faintly in the darkness. "I wonder if this thing can directly observe the Bloodline Divine Ability Divine Markings of Ferocious Beasts?"

If he did not need to wait for a Ferocious Beast to activate its Divine Ability and for the Divine Markings to surface on its body before recording them, but could instead use Spirit Eyes to see the structure of the Divine Markings hidden deep within its fur, flesh, and blood...

The more Lin Yi thought about it, the more excited he became.

That would mean that whenever he encountered any Ferocious Beast with a Bloodline Divine Ability in the future, he could directly imprint its Divine Markings without even waiting for it to enter a battle state.

Both safety and efficiency would double.

"Not bad, not bad." He leaned against the wall and grinned.

That complete ink-black diagram of the Inkshadow Leopard's Divine Markings still awaited comprehension.