Dawn clawed its way across the horizon, staining the sky the color of bruised flesh; violet which bleed into a crimson hue. Zhang Yan staggered into his hut, the door slamming shut behind him with a hollow thud. The night's toll clung to him like a second skin: his robes clung in tatters, icy burns from Tao Yiming's ghostly strikes spiderwebbing across his chest and arms. Every muscle screamed, his meridians raw from overexertion. Yet beneath the exhaustion, a dark current of satisfaction hummed in his veins.
His shadow pooled thickly at his feet, swollen and restless. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat, sated by the fear, the violence and whispers of death it had devoured during the chase. Even now, faint echoes of the battle flickered within it; the shrieks of spirits, the crackle of ghost-light and the metallic tang of his own blood.
To become stronger...
Survival was all that mattered.
He sank onto the cracked meditation mat, the straw beneath it prickling against his torn palms. Closing his eyes, he drew a shuddering breath and pressed his hands to his Dantian. The Devouring Nine Shadows technique stirred, sluggish at first, then surging as the qi stored in his shadow uncoiled. It flooded his meridians, cold and inexorable, like black water carving through stone.
He channeled the stolen qi, cold and seething, through his battered meridians, purging the rot of the ghostly qi.
The process was agony. His flesh remembered Tao Yiming's strikes; the way the ghostly qi had burrowed into his muscles, freezing and corroding. But the shadow qi fought back, purging the lingering corruption. His bones groaned as they knit denser, his sinews tightening like steel cables. A dark sheen crept across his skin, subtle as oil on water, hardening what was once vulnerable.
The barrier shattered!
A soundless explosion reverberated through his bones and flesh as the qi within him surged!