Wēn Ruòhán was dead and the war that once ravaged the cultivation world had finally come to an end, but its aftermath gave rise to a new era of challenges.
Jīn Guāngshàn, a driven and ambitious Sect Leader driven by his insatiable thirst for power a...
The decision would shape the course of their lives, and the fate of the cultivation world, for generations to come.
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Wèi Wúxiàn's body was wracked with violent tremors as he reached out with an unsteady hand and placed it on Wēn Níng's chest, just above his faintly beating heart. The thready pulse he felt there was the sole reassurance that his friend still clung precariously to life. His throat constricted painfully, bile rising, as a wave of nausea slammed into him. Swallowing hard against the urge to retch, he trailed his trembling fingers down Wēn Níng's abdomen, surveying the full, nightmarish extent of the atrocities inflicted upon his friend's ravaged body.
The young man's torso was a canvas of anguish made flesh. Furious welts and gouging lacerations crisscrossed his chest in a lattice of oozing wounds, evidence of some brutal whipping or beating that had flayed the skin from muscle. Mottled bruises marred the flesh in a perverse mockery of blossoms, their hues ranging from putrid yellow to deepest blues and blacks. In some areas, the brutality had been so severe that the bruising had torn through to the underlying musculature, affording sickening glimpses of sinew and tendon beneath the ruined skin.
Wēn Níng's abdomen fared no better - a rutted, scored landscape of damage that seemed to swell and undulate with each pained exhalation. There, long, jagged slashes crossed over deep gouges and puncture wounds, their ragged edges caked with dried blood and seeping pus. Mottled bruising darkened his sides, disappearing beneath his back in a ring of contusions so deep they bordered on the color of rot itself.
But the worst was yet to come. Suppressing the urge to vomit, Wèi Wúxiàn gently rolled Wēn Níng onto his side, exposing his brutalized back, and very nearly lost the battle with his rebelling stomach.
Wēn Níng's back was a waking nightmare of pain made manifest - a topography of torture and agony rendered in shredded flesh and congealed blood. Jagged, oozing lacerations crisscrossed the ruined skin in a macabre web, each gash sliced so deeply that it seemed to have laid bare the very bones beneath. The wounds wept viscous runnels of blood and pus, the acrid stench of infection cloyingly thick in the air.
In some areas, the flesh had quite literally been flayed away, hanging in thin ribbons to expose the raw, angry muscle underneath. The damage was so catastrophic, so visceral, that Wèi Wúxiàn could scarcely comprehend how Wēn Níng still lived. Huge, mottled contusions blossomed across the tattered landscape of his back like grotesque, purplish-black flowers, their centers so darkly bruised they seemed almost necrotic.
As his gaze roved over this portrait of suffering given corporeal form, something amid the butchery snagged Wèi Wúxiàn's eye - a sickeningly familiar shape seared into the abused flesh. Throat constricting, he leaned close enough to make out the unmistakable emblem of a brand of peony motif caused by Branding Irons, the sigil of the Lánlíng Jīn Clan — their crest symbol, the Sparks-Amidst-Snow, crudely burned into the lacerated skin of Wēn Níng's back.
