His consciousness seemed to sink into a bottomless frozen abyss-cold, dark, deathly still. After an unknown stretch of time, a faint glimmer pierced the darkness. Agony swept over him like a tide, wrenching Han Li out of unconsciousness.
"Ugh..." He groaned and abruptly opened his eyes. His vision blurred, and the world spun around him. Every inch of bone, every meridian in his body throbbed with tearing pain. His organs felt as though they had shifted out of place, while his dantian was utterly empty, radiating waves of weakness and brokenness that made his heart tremble.
He found himself lying on a bed of icy rubble. Gray mist surrounded him, with the faint outlines of jagged rocks and dead trees visible through it. A faint odor of decay hung in the air, mingled with an unfamiliar, sparse spiritual energy. He was no longer in the Silent Sea Region, but the surroundings remained hostile.
[Warning! Host critically injured and near death! Golden core fragmentation: 85%! Spiritual power completely depleted! Extensive meridian ruptures! Physical damage: 79%! Vital signs extremely weak! System energy critically low. Entering minimum-power maintenance mode...]
In his mind, the system's intermittent notifications were so faint he could barely hear them.
Han Li struggled to examine his body inwardly, and his heart sank to rock bottom. Within his dantian, the profound fiend golden core, once the size of a pigeon's egg and a deep, dark red, was now covered in a spiderweb of cracks. Its light had dimmed almost entirely, leaving only a tiny glimmer stubbornly flickering at its center, as though it might be extinguished at any moment. His cultivation had fallen to the early stage of Foundation Establishment, and even that was unstable, his realm teetering on the brink of collapse.
This time, he had truly