His head felt like it was splitting open!!!
The moment Xia Lun opened his eyes, a searing pain slammed into the back of his head. Before his thoughts could come together, they shattered like a raw egg dropped on the floor.
"Hiss..."
He instinctively sucked in a breath, only to feel mildly suffocated. A hoarse rasp, like a broken bellows, sounded in his ears.
His instincts struggled through the fog in his mind. After a moment, he realized he smelled coal smoke. He could almost feel soot scraping his nasal passages and flooding his lungs, and he began to cough.
"Cough, cough... cough, cough..."
The violent coughing made the pain worse, but the discomfort also brought some clarity back to his scattered mind.
Where... am... I?
His thoughts moved sluggishly. Every new idea sent a stab of pain through his head, as though an iron spike were plowing back and forth through his brain. Heat surged, his nerves screamed, and the burning pain spread from the back of his head until it engulfed everything.
Through sheer will, he forced his heavy eyelids open. Then he saw a sphere of liquid as big as a pumpkin!
The sphere wavered amid overlapping images, glimmering with a hazy sheen.
Drip.
The sphere of liquid fell from his forehead and landed on the table. Only after a dazed moment did Xia Lun realize that the enormous "sphere" had been a drop of cold sweat on his brow.
"My thoughts are coming apart. It's a bit like... a hangover."
Xia Lun muttered to himself and struggled to lift his gaze. A row of dark green wine bottles stood before him.
He narrowed his eyes to look at them more closely, but his elbow suddenly jerked beyond his control and struck one of the bottles.
Crash!