Thunder rumbled ceaselessly overhead. Towering waves tossed his body about, slowly sinking it to the bottom of Accumulated-Water Lake.
Xie Jinhuan followed like a shadow, experiencing, for the first time in his life, the bizarre sensation of "his body flying ahead while his soul chased behind."
As his divine soul returned to its place, the suffocating pain from his battered chest, abdomen, and arms nearly stopped his thoughts. The lightning receding across the water also stirred a few long-forgotten images deep in his mind.
Three years ago, great waves had overturned the boat. Just like this, he had sunk alone into the deep sea, wounded and exhausted, feeling as though the whole world had abandoned him.
But when he vanished completely into that endless black abyss, a red glow suddenly rose within the utter darkness.
The red light resembled two boundless pools of blood, outlining the shape of eyes. Between those eyes, he was as insignificant as dust, yet he was also the only object in that pitch-black world.
Then strands of flowing red light welled up from the depths of Black Abyss, connected to the point between his brows, and spread along his eight extraordinary meridians into every limb and bone.
He could feel his flesh and bones disintegrating, as though the red abyss were devouring him. Yet they also seemed to be rebuilding under some power, so that phantom patterns of scales kept surfacing over his body.
It was as though he had traveled thirty thousand li through adversity in a flood dragon transformation, finally returning to the vast sea and undergoing the change from serpent to dragon!
He gazed at those red eyes beneath the endless Black Abyss, and the eyes gazed back. Then he gradually lost consciousness, without knowing where he went.
When he awoke again,