Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Three hundred miles north of Duanyue Ridge lay the abandoned Cold Pool Medicine Valley.

In its early years, Zhen’e Palace used this place to treat disciples with the Balebone, but now, only Gong Hegui and I remained.

The half of a Golden Core inside me had remained unstable; the slightest circulation of energy felt like cracks spreading through it. The Calamity Balefire within Gong Hegui was even more troublesome. Should it spiral out of control, his meridians would be incinerated at best, and every living soul within a hundred miles would be annihilated at worst.

I had originally assumed everyone feared him because of a naturally ferocious temperament.

It was only after I began treating his injuries that I realized the reason he had kept such a cold, stony face all these years was simply because he was enduring pain every single day.

He endured the Calamity Miasma churning in his marrow, the fear of those around him, and the hypocrisy of people who begged him to draw his sword one moment, only to revile him as an ill omen the next.

“Is that why you’re always alone?” I asked.

Gong Hegui leaned against the wall of cold jade, his robes half-open, revealing a chest covered in old scars. Hearing my question, he merely said indifferently, “If people get too close, it’s easy for them to be dragged down by me.”

I pricked the final silver needle near his heart and said provocatively, “You don’t seem afraid of dragging me down now.”

He looked down at me, his voice very low. “You were dragged down by me long ago.”

It was a strange thing to say, but his expression was overly serious.

I finished sealing his last Bale Vein, but my vision suddenly went black as my spiritual power bottomed out. As I pitched forward, Gong Hegui caught me, pressing his palm against the center of my back to steadily transfer spiritual breath into me.

Instinctively, I tried to struggle, but he said in a heavy voice, “Don’t move. Your dantian is about to crack.”

His spiritual breath shared the same source as the half-Golden Core in my body, and it quickly stabilized the frantic, stabbing pain. Because we were so close, I could clearly see an old scar beneath his collarbone, looking as though it had been pinned through by a talisman spike.

“How did you get that?”

“When I was a child,” he said. “Someone wanted to gouge out my Calamity Bone to refine it into an Array Key.”

My fingertips paused.

He suddenly pulled a faded red thread from his robes and held it out to me.

“Do you remember this?”

The thread was extremely thin, yet I recognized it at a glance. Many years ago, I had found a little beggar boy at the foot of the mountain who was nearly frozen to death. I had given him a warm cake, and fearing he might get lost, I had casually tied a red thread around his wrist.

I never expected that person to be Gong Hegui.

“So it was you.”

He gave a soft grunt of affirmation, the tips of his ears turning slightly red. “That’s why I wasn’t surprised at all when you saved me on the Cold Soul Platform that day.”

I was about to speak when the sound of a spiritual array being tripped echoed from outside.

Gong Hegui raised his hand to extinguish the lamp. In the darkness, I saw a cold glint in his eyes.

“The pursuers are back.”

“And this time, the person leading them carries your Master’s aura.”