Gu Mochen shook his head vigorously, his messy hair sticking to his eyelids with sweat.
"But look at that piece of paper!"
He wrote down the dangers of the medicine, the consequences of severing the pulse, and the cost of shortening one's lifespan, all clearly and meticulously!
"This isn't a sneak attack, Old Zhou, this is a calculated move set up by Lao San in front of me!"
He handed me the knife handle and told me to choose: either to be devoured like a mad dog by some foreign poison until I was nothing but bones, or to smash this stinking carcass to pieces and stay alive to watch the battle unfold outside!
The veins on Gu Mochen's neck bulged, and his voice suddenly rose, causing the surrounding iron chains to clang and rattle.
"I, Gu Mochen, dare to chew up and swallow even treasonous travel documents, so why would I be afraid of taking this bitter medicine that shortens my lifespan?!"
"As long as I can protect the sea borders of Great Yan, as long as I can watch those island dwarfs get chopped up and thrown into the sea to feed the fish, what does it matter whether I can pick up a sword or not!"
Zhou Huaili trembled all over, looking up at Gu Mochen who was like a madman. His lips trembled, but he could no longer utter a single word of dissuasion.
"Give it to me."
Gu Mochen stared at the white wax pill, his eyes burning with intense light.
"Your Highness..." Zhou Huaili knelt on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.
"I'm telling you to bring it here! Crush it!"
Gu Mochen gritted his teeth, letting out a dying, beast-like roar.
Stop crying like a woman! Shove the medicine into your mouth!
Zhou Huaili fiercely wiped away the tears and blood from his face, his hands trembling as he stretched out his fingers, his nails digging hard into the hard beeswax.
A crisp snapping sound.
The thick white wax shell shattered with a crack, revealing a jet-black pill.
Zhou Huaili crawled forward on his knees, half-kneeling beneath the stone pillar, and pressed the pill firmly between Gu Mochen's blood-stained lips and teeth with his eyes closed.
Gu Mochen opened his mouth and bit down, the pill instantly sliding into the back of his tongue.
The moment the pill entered my throat, it wasn't warm as I had imagined. Instead, it felt like swallowing a lump of solid ice made of cast iron, which iced down my esophagus and into my lower abdomen.
The pervasive herbal odor was instantly overwhelmed by a nauseating metallic smell.
Gu Mochen's eyes widened to their limit in an instant, and the capillaries around his eye sockets burst open, staining the entire white of his eyes a bright red.
The extremely cold medicinal power refined from the gallbladder of the five-step snake and the seven-leaf aconite was like an awakened ice dragon, ruthlessly crashing into his already riddled heart meridians.
The yin poison of the Bliss Pills, lurking deep in the bone marrow, was originally an extremely yin and potent evil spirit from overseas, and now it was encountering such an unreasonable and deadly poison attack.
The two forces clashed within Gu Mochen's narrow and frail body, instantly unleashing a raging torrent.
"Heh... heh..."
Gu Mochen's jaw trembled violently, but he couldn't even utter a complete scream. He could only let the heavy, short breaths scrape violently in his throat.
On his exposed arms and neck, the skin that was originally bluish-purple suddenly swelled up, and dark blue veins, each as thick as a little finger, bulged out from under the skin like earthworms, writhing and twisting violently, becoming unrecognizable as human.
Immediately afterwards, a series of chilling cracking sounds erupted from all parts of his body.
Click!
Click!
Under the alternating onslaught of extreme cold and pathogenic heat, the eight extraordinary meridians are forcibly disintegrated, torn apart, and then reassembled inch by inch.
The tough cowhide rope was stretched taut by his bulging flesh, and the black blood that had seeped into the rope was squeezed out, dripping onto the ground along the grain of the stone pillar.
Zhou Huaili was terrified and scrambled forward, trying to protect Gu Mochen's head with his hands, but the chilling aura emanating from Gu Mochen made his hands go numb.
"Puff--!"
Gu Mochen suddenly tilted his head back, his face contorted like a demon, and a mouthful of pitch-black blood, mixed with fragments of internal organs, gushed out from his mouth and nose.
As he spat out the mouthful of black blood, the bulging veins all over Gu Mochen's body visibly deflated, and he slid helplessly down the stone pillar like a skeleton that had been emptied.
The black iron chains and leather ropes were tightly wedged under his armpits and shoulder blades, barely keeping him suspended in mid-air.
His head hung low, his long hair was scattered and covered his chest, and the rise and fall of his chest was so faint that you could hardly feel any breath unless you put your finger to his nose.
A suffocating, deathly silence fell over the room.
"Your Highness... Your Highness, please wake up!"
Zhou Huaili scrambled to grab his short knife and frantically slashed at the leather ropes binding Gu Mochen. Several strands of the rough ropes were severed by the blade.
He embraced Gu Mochen's limp and cold body without a care, using his own chest to warm the other's blood-stained chest.
"Open your eyes and look!"
The shouts echoed through the empty, desolate room.
After an unknown amount of time, the broken body leaning against Zhou Huaili's shoulder twitched very slightly.
Immediately afterwards, a cough as faint as a mosquito's buzz escaped from Gu Mochen's tightly closed lips.
His fingers twitched, trying to grab the stone pillar beside him, but as his fingertips brushed against the stone surface, he felt weak and powerless. His once proud martial physique had now turned into a helpless lump of mud.
When he painstakingly pried open his eyelids a crack, the murky, dark bloodshot eyelids had completely disappeared, leaving only a pair of pupils that had been honed to a crystal-clear clarity by the pain.
I stopped taking the Bliss Pills because of its intense, bone-chilling itching.
His body was as cold as an ice cellar, his limbs and bones felt empty, and he could no longer gather any true energy.
But that insane, agonizing thirst that made one want to kill themselves was completely eradicated by this destructive drug.
"Old... Old Zhou."
Gu Mochen's voice was very soft, as soft as a withered leaf falling in autumn, but every word was clear and there was not a trace of nonsense.
Zhou Huaili shuddered, hurriedly raised his hand to wipe away the tears on his face, and pressed his ear to Gu Mochen's lips.
"Yes, Your Highness! Please give your orders!"
Gu Mochen took a deep breath, and a slow smile spread across his lips.
"Third brother... didn't lie to me."
He closed his eyes, feeling the emptiness and tranquility after his meridians had completely shattered.
"The poison... is cured."
Zhou Huaili's eyes welled up with tears, which streamed down his face once more, and he nodded repeatedly.
"It's resolved, it's resolved! As long as we're alive, we'll get through this..."
Gu Mochen glanced at him sideways. Although he was unable to move, his royal princely aura remained undiminished.
"I am now half a cripple."
"Go and retrieve the ' Sea-Calming ' sword that I hid in the secret compartment."
He took a few deep breaths, his gaze piercing through the dim doorway, as if he could see the turbulent shores of the East Sea thousands of miles away.
Tell Gu Moran... I've staked everything on him.
"Let him take my sword... to Dengzhou, to the sea!"
Gu Mochen clenched his teeth, and blood seeped from between them.
"This grand drama of family feuds and national hatred... he'll be the one to perform it."
"Use the heads of those Japanese devils to make this play... completely and perfectly complete!"