Badump! Badump!
Zhou Wen felt his heart beating like a drum as it raced faster and faster. It gave him a feeling that his heart would literally leap out of his chest.
Could this heart arrhythmia be a result of my frequent loss of blood? Zhou Wen had never experienced this before. He intended to open his eyes and get up to ease the discomfort.
However, he could neither open his eyes nor sit up. He wasn't even able to move his fingers. The feeling was akin to the desire to urinate while dreaming, but being unable to get up.
What's happening? Zhou Wen felt an ominous feeling rise up in him. He was certain that he wasn't dreaming for his mind was extremely lucid.
What made him feel worse was that he felt as though something was pressing down on him. It was growing in weight, leaving him stifled. He could hardly breathe.
Even so, Zhou Wen still couldn't open his eyes. Nor could he move. It appeared as though he couldn't wake up from his dream.
Could this be the ghost oppression that Grandfather was speaking of when I was little? He thought.
As Zhou Wen's father was very busy with work and he lacked a mother, he was brought up by his grandfather from a young age. Every evening, his grandfather would tell him stories to coax him to sleep.
As for his grandfather's stories, they were mostly ghost stories. Perhaps one of them was the story of the mysterious phone. However, Zhou Wen was still young back then, so he didn't remember most of them. Only a few especially frightening ones had left a deep impression on him until today. One of them was about ghost oppression.
Zhou Wen felt that his present situation was very similar to the ghost oppression his grandfather had spoken of. His mind was very lucid, but he couldn't wake up or move.
It felt as though a heavy object was pressing on him as his heart raced. It left him extremely uncomfortable, to the point of retching. Yet, he couldn't do so.
This feeling continued from the middle of the night until just after six in the morning. Only then did Zhou Wen recover the control of his body. He instantly got up, ran to the bathroom, and vomited into the toilet.
Even as he was about to vomit his bile, he remained somewhat in discomfort.
What's wrong? It couldn't be as simple as food poisoning, right? Zhou Wen suddenly thought of his encounter with Jing Daoxian last night. He couldn't help but be alarmed. Don't tell me it has to do with Jing Daoxian?
Zhou Wen washed his face before heading to the living room. He picked up the stack of violet metal sheets he had stored away in a drawer.
It hadn't experienced any changes and the words were clearly engraved on the metal, neither too deep nor too shallow.
Jing Daoxian is known for being capricious. He definitely wasn't up to any good by giving me the Lost Immortal Sutra after I rejected him. Perhaps the problem stems from this metal slab. Could it be that he poisoned me? Zhou Wen suspected that Jing Daoxian had placed some form of hallucinogen on the violet metal slab that could seep into the body through contact.
He had learned such general knowledge in school, and he did pretty well in his studies. Using tweezers, he placed the violet slab in a glass container and did a simple test. However, he didn't find any poisonous reactions.
There isn't any poison? Or could the poison be relatively special and prevent ordinary methods of discovering it? Zhou Wen frowned slightly.
With all of that done, Zhou Wen felt that his body had recovered. His heart had calmed down and he no longer felt nauseous.
He suspected a case of food poisoning, so he took some digestive medicine. His body seemed to fully recover and there weren't any further abnormalities.
As he took note of his body, he began grinding in-game. Now, Zhou Wen was already capable of singlehandedly killing the Skeleton General in-game. He just required quite a bit of time, taking nearly an hour to kill the Skeleton General once.
Nothing dropped when he killed the Skeleton General in-game a second time. It left him somewhat disappointed.
Unwilling to waste his blood to restart the Ancient Sovereign City dungeon, he decided to venture deeper into it.
The ancient buildings were connected like a massive maze. Zhou Wen had the intention of heading into one of the ancient buildings to take a look, but he was afraid of dying, making it a waste of blood.
The deeper he headed into Ancient Sovereign City, the more Skeleton Soldiers he encountered. Towards the end, he had encountered tides of Skeleton Soldiers that he couldn't clear no matter how hard he tried. Yet, there was no sight of a Skeleton General.
This continued late into the night and the streets were filled with endless numbers of skeletons. Giving up, Zhou Wen stormed out of the area and chose to quit the game.
He hadn't had a good night's sleep the previous night, so his fatigue was getting to him. He decided to sleep early to spruce himself up for tomorrow's continued efforts.
It didn't take him long to fall asleep, but not long after, he snapped awake again. He was suffering from sleep paralysis again.
His heart raced as something heavy pressed down on him. He felt extreme discomfort.
Damn it… It's definitely not as simple as food poisoning… It must have been Jing Daoxian… Zhou Wen had the urge to curse.
He had no grudge with Jing Daoxian. He had just declined Jing Daoxian's offer of the Skyfiend Treatise and this was the outcome. He was truly loathsome.
After enduring through the night, the feeling vanished at dawn. Roughly at the same time as the day before, Zhou Wen once again regained control of his body.
He got up again and rushed to the bathroom. The vomiting was worse than yesterday, making him feel as though he was about to vomit out his stomach.
Like yesterday, the discomfort quickly vanished. If it wasn't because of the excruciating pain from before and his vomit still in the toilet, Zhou Wen would have thought that his discomfort was nothing but an illusion.
He was very certain that the problem was likely a result of Jing Daoxian.
To seek him out was clearly unpragmatic.
The entire Federation had Jing Daoxian on a wanted list for decades but had failed to apprehend him. It was nearly impossible for a higher schooler like Zhou Wen to find him.
Even if he were lucky and ended up finding Jing Daoxian, Zhou Wen didn't believe that he possessed the means to redress this injustice.
After some thought, he took out the Lost Immortal Sutra slab. Without any hesitation, he flipped through it and read its contents.
Jing Daoxian had told him that it recorded an interesting Essence Energy Art that he should cultivate in. This made Zhou Wen believe that the resolution to his problems lay in the Lost Immortal Sutra.
Although this thought didn't seem to hinge on anything reliable, Zhou Wen was without options. All he could do was first figure out what Lost Immortal Sutra was before making a decision.