Just as Qian Fan's consciousness was about to be swallowed by the chaotic voices, the strange chicken suddenly pecked hard enough to break the skin at the tip of his tongue. A potent taste of blood exploded in his mouth, jolting him awake in an instant.
He shook his muddled head and saw countless pairs of eyes emerging in the mist-they dotted the knots in tree trunks, the cracks in the moss, and the wing cases of beetles. Every pair glimmered with an eerie light, reflecting the faint vertical line between his brows, like countless voyeurs watching his every move.
When Qian Fan clenched the scale in his palm and gritted his teeth to keep walking, all those eyes suddenly closed. The entire forest plunged into absolute darkness, leaving only the runes on the strange chicken's wings glowing faintly, illuminating the rotten leaves at his feet. At some point, a clear trail of footprints had appeared there. Their shape matched his shoe prints exactly, except for an additional mark left by a dragging chain. That mark twisted and wound toward a spot of spectral blue in the deepest mist.
"Go..." A slightly hoarse voice, textured like metal scraping against metal, suddenly sounded in his mind. Qian Fan looked down in surprise and saw the runes on the scale in his palm crawling along his blood vessels toward his heart. Every inch of their advance brought excruciating pain, as though they were tearing open a wound that had long since scabbed over.
He involuntarily recalled the scenes he had witnessed before losing consciousness: the bottomless black hole in the black-robed figure's palm, Zhang Xin's warped and distorted body, Xu Fangyuan's extinguished star martial soul... Those images suddenly turned into countless beetles that poured out of his throat. The words "An appetizer