He drifted in a daze, unaware of how much time had passed.
Suddenly, Wang Dong felt comfortable, as though he were soaking in a bath with the water at just the right temperature.
Wang Dong wanted to open his eyes and look around, but he couldn't.
He tried to listen, but couldn't make anything out clearly.
But aside from his inability to see, his sense of touch and smell seemed to remain.
There was a scent of Chinese medicinal herbs at his nose. A medicinal bath?
Wang Dong smiled inwardly. No one but Mei Fang would do this for him.
Drowsiness crept over him, and all of Wang Dong's senses vanished again.
In his dazed state, Wang Dong had no idea how many times he had regained consciousness or how many times he had "fallen asleep." Every time he woke, his body felt a little warmer.
Perhaps it wouldn't be long before he returned to normal.
Then, during one of those awakenings, Wang Dong suddenly sensed a change.
The warmth around him had vanished. Someone seemed to have lifted him out of where he had been and moved him somewhere else.
He thought it was about to end, but before long, he felt a chilling cold surge toward him from every direction.
The sensation was deeply unpleasant.
He wanted to shout, but couldn't. He wanted to "sleep," but couldn't fall asleep.
He had no idea how long this continued before he suddenly felt the chill slowly receding.
Relief washed over him, and he began waiting for the cold to fade completely.
But just as Wang Dong felt he was about to return to normal, that chill surged back, as though it had been reset!
This repeated until Wang Dong had endured it six times!
Those six rounds of torment had driven him half mad. If he woke up, he would bite whoever kept tormenting him to death.
He absolutely would!
As though in retaliation for that decision, the next wave of cold suddenly grew more than ten times stronger-and kept intensifying!
Wang Dong felt as though he were encased in ice. The chilling aura pierced his skin from every direction, bored through his flesh, and seeped into his marrow!
All the way into... his soul!
Wang Dong's thoughts grew sluggish, yet his body seemed to have adapted to the cold.
His body began absorbing it involuntarily.
After another unknown stretch of time, the cold abruptly stopped, and Wang Dong sensed something else.
Hunger-or perhaps thirst.
Fortunately, he didn't have to endure that feeling for long before his wish was granted.
Warm liquid flowed into his mouth and down his throat. Before it could reach his stomach, his body absorbed every last drop.
Wang Dong grew even hungrier and thirstier.
He wanted more!
Suddenly, he seemed to catch a scent.
It smelled just like... just like his favorite liquor!
The scent drifted closer and farther away, teasing what little awareness Wang Dong had left.
Then, at one moment, the scent suddenly came within reach!
Dimly, Wang Dong thought he heard a voice. It was familiar, but he couldn't remember whose it was, and he didn't want to think about it.
Because right now, he had only one thought.
Eat!
That powerful urge drove him to try to open his eyes.
Almost. They were almost open!
Almost!
Whoosh!
At last, Wang Dong opened his eyes and saw a sea of white.
But he was soon drawn to the only thing within that white expanse.
He reached out, seized it, and bit down.
Gulp!
As the liquid slid down his throat, Wang Dong's whole body trembled with excitement.
He eagerly continued swallowing in great gulps.
The more he swallowed, the clearer his senses became. Dimly, he heard the clearest words he had heard yet.
"Dong, I miss you so much."
Dong?
Who was that?
The last mouthful of liquid slid down his throat. A searing aura rampaged through his body before finally merging with the cold he had absorbed earlier.
The moment everything inside him settled, Wang Dong's awareness of his own body began to fade.
As his consciousness sank completely into darkness, he seemed to remember something.
Am I Dong? Then who is missing me?
Chen Miao woke, but didn't lift his head from the table.
He forced himself into the iceheart state, suppressing the surge of emotion stirring deep within him.
"It affected me."
Chen Miao took out his phone and opened the front-facing camera.
On the screen, he looked bewildered, his eyes bloodshot.
Chen Miao reviewed the memory he had just experienced.
He didn't know Wang Dong, nor did he know Mei Fang.
But that boy whose eyes glowed an eerie green...
"So, was that Zhong Fa too?"
Chen Miao looked at [Lin Ziyang's Memory Fragment] in his inventory. He knew he would have his answer after viewing it.
But he didn't dare look at another one.
Old Wang's memory fragment hadn't affected him much because Old Wang hadn't experienced any intense emotional fluctuations.
Chen Miao had assumed all memory fragments were like that. But everything he had just experienced, those powerful emotions, had frightened him a little.
Without the "iceheart" state to help suppress those emotions, he didn't know what they might have driven him to do.
Looking away from his inventory, Chen Miao turned the book to the author information page.
As he had expected, another state had appeared.
[Current states: iceheart, Heart-to-Heart, yin gathering] Yin gathering: allows the user to actively gather nearby yin energy around their body. The amount gathered depends on the environment.
Yin gathering?
Chen Miao thought of the bouts of chilling cold Wang Dong had experienced in the memory.
So that was yin gathering?
With a thought from Chen Miao, wisps of chilling energy hidden in the surrounding air began gathering around his body and flowing into his palm.
But this lasted only half a minute before ending.
He opened his hand. A strand of chilling energy as fine as a hair floated above his palm, invisible to the naked eye but perceptible to Chen Miao.
"So this is yin energy?"
Sensing the yin energy in his palm, Chen Miao guided it around different parts of his body. Wherever it went, a chill immediately followed.
As he controlled it, however, Chen Miao noticed that the strand of yin energy grew smaller and smaller until it vanished.
The yin energy hadn't been consumed. Rather, once he stopped gathering it, the collected energy dispersed on its own, merging back into the surrounding environment.
"So yin energy is actually everywhere. The only difference is that its concentration varies from place to place?"
"Then if there's yin energy, naturally there's yang energy too. Did the temperature rise a little just now because the yin energy was drawn away, leaving yang energy dominant?"
A term came to Chen Miao.
"Yin-yang imbalance! Is this what they call yin-yang imbalance?"
"Does that mean the ancients knew about yin and yang energy long ago, and that's how yin-yang theory came about?"
A feeling suddenly came over Chen Miao.
The farther he traveled down this path, the more he would come to understand.
And the worldview he had spent over twenty years building might well be destroyed and reshaped in the process.
He didn't know whether that was good or bad.
But he knew he had to accept it!
His gaze returned to yin gathering. After that test, he already knew where he could put it to use.
Rustle!
He flipped the book to the [Miscellaneous Arts List] page.
His gaze settled on "Zhong Family Talismans."
"When making talismans, use yellow talisman paper as the base and cinnabar mixed with chicken blood as ink. Draw the specified runes on the paper, incorporating the yin force within your body into the ink as you draw to perform Spirit Infusion on the talisman."
"If you lack yin force, you may also draw them in a place rich in yin energy. The effectiveness of talismans made this way depends on the concentration of yin energy."
Before you continue