291: Chapter 291 Self-Rescue in a Desperate Situation

Every breath felt like sucking hot sand through a broken bellows, scorching every inch from throat to lungs. Every heartbeat was heavy, sluggish, carrying a sense of impending exhaustion, pumping blood that seemed to have become thick and cold. Consciousness was like a thin sheet of ice floating on an icy sea, with the endless, dark abyss named "Sleep" or "Death" beneath, constantly sending temptations to sink.

Ling Ye leaned back against the cold metal wreckage, eyes closed, using all his willpower to fight the fatigue and darkness that threatened to swallow him whole. His body was protesting, his Soul was wailing, but he knew he couldn't sleep yet, couldn't give up.

Beside him, Old Shi's breathing was so faint it was almost imperceptible. Every extremely slight rise and fall tugged at the hideous, darkening cracks on its right arm and chest that were almost oozing thick black liquid. The scent of death, like cold mist, enveloped it.

He had to deal with Old Shi's contamination first.

Ling Ye slowly, with extreme difficulty, opened his eyes again. His vision was blurred, with double images, requiring effort to focus to see his surroundings. He struggled, using his still-movable left hand to brace against the ground, little by little, changing his posture from sitting slumped to half-kneeling. Just this simple movement made his vision go black, almost causing him to collapse again.

He gasped for a few breaths, his gaze sweeping over the interior of this small, dark blue "The Shelter". The dark blue halo flowing on the ground seemed to contain some kind of extremely thin, but unusually peaceful energy. Those broken dark silver metal remains and crystal fragments, though dead and silent, seemed to have a weak, natural "repulsion" or "stabilizing" effect on the chaotic energy around them.

Perhaps... it could be utilized.

He gritted his teeth, pressing his left hand against the ground, attempting to guide and absorb the meager energy contained in the dark blue halo on the ground. The process was exceptionally difficult. The Meridians in his body were like a dried-up, cracked riverbed; any injection of external energy brought tearing pain. Moreover, although this dark blue energy was peaceful, its properties seemed different from the "Order" or "Ancient Ring" powers he was familiar with, carrying a cold, empty, and seemingly all-calming characteristic, making the efficiency of absorption and conversion extremely low.

But he did not give up. A thread, two threads... like digging for water droplets seeping in a desert, slowly and painfully, he introduced that sliver of cold, dark blue energy into his body, guiding it along his broken Meridians, moving and condensing it with extreme difficulty.

This process lasted for an unknown amount of time. Perhaps only a few minutes, yet it felt like several hours. When he finally condensed a wisp of energy in his body—less than one-thousandth of his usual amount, pitifully weak, mixed with his own residual will and that cold dark blue characteristic—Ling Ye stopped. Sweat had soaked his tattered clothes, and his complexion was no better than Old Shi's.

Trembling, he extended his left hand, palm facing up, carefully suspending that wisp of energy—weak to the point of being almost invisible, interwoven with pale gold and dark blue—above his palm as if holding fragile glass.

Then, he moved to Old Shi's side, using his left hand to gently lift Old Shi's right wrist, which was covered in black cracks, ice-cold, and almost devoid of life force. His gaze fell upon that dark red "interface" scar, which was almost completely covered by black cracks.

The "the key" mark on his chest throbbed faintly, seemingly wanting to do something, but it too was dim and powerless.

He had to rely on himself.

Ling Ye took a deep breath, focusing all his spirit on the weak wisp of energy in his palm. He did not attempt to use this power for "Purification" or to "dispel" the contamination that had penetrated deep into the bone marrow and was almost intertwined with Old Shi's Origin—that would only accelerate its death. He could only try... to isolate. Using this weak power, which contained the "Ancient Ring" garrison rhythm (from his own will imprint) and the local dark blue cold energy, he built a layer of extremely fragile, but perhaps temporarily delaying, ice-blue energy "isolation layer" or "frozen zone" around Old Shi's crumbling "interface" and at the forefront of the black cracks spreading toward its heart and head.

He carefully used the energy in his palm like the finest brush, bit by bit painting and imprinting it onto the skin around the "interface" scar on Old Shi's right wrist. Following the direction of the black cracks' spread, he moved upstream, leaving tiny, almost invisible energy nodes emitting a faint ice-blue light at the tips of the cracks and at key positions near the heart and neck arteries.

Each energy node placed was accompanied by an unconscious, slight twitch of Old Shi's body, as if its body was instinctively rejecting this foreign, cold power. Ling Ye's movements had to be extremely gentle and precise, ensuring the energy nodes could "adhere" at the skin and energy levels to act as an isolation, without causing additional impact to its already fragile body.

This was an extremely mentally and physically exhausting process. When the last ice-blue energy node was painstakingly imprinted beside Old Shi's left carotid artery, temporarily blocking the thickest black crack spreading up from the shoulder, the weak wisp of energy in Ling Ye's palm was completely exhausted.

He let go, his body falling backward, leaning heavily against the cold metal wreckage again. His chest heaved violently, stars danced before his eyes, and he almost blacked out.

But he forced himself to hold on, casting his gaze toward Old Shi.

Those hideous black cracks had not disappeared, nor had their color faded. But their speed of spreading seemed... really, to have slowed down. Just like a surging, black river of poison, when passing through certain key passes, it was temporarily blocked and diverted by a thin, almost invisible wall of ice. Although the ice wall might break at any time and the poison river was still slowly seeping through, at least the unstoppable momentum aimed directly at the vitals had been forcibly slowed down.

Old Shi's breathing also seemed... to have stabilized by an extremely slight margin. Although still weak, it was no longer that intermittent feeling that it could cut off completely at any moment.

The tight string in Ling Ye's heart loosened just a little. But this was only a stopgap measure, treating the symptoms but not the root cause. He didn't know how long this fragile ice-blue isolation layer could last. The erosion of the contamination in Old Shi's body had not stopped, only delayed. Once the isolation layer failed, or its physical condition deteriorated further, the erosion would likely rebound with even greater intensity.

He had to recover more strength as soon as possible and find a more effective method.

After resting for a moment and feeling like he had caught his breath, Ling Ye struggled to sit up again.

He sat cross-legged, closed his eyes, and stopped trying to absorb the inefficient dark blue energy from the ground. Instead, he sank all his focus into his body, into the dim "the key" mark, and into the vast and resilient rhythm deep within, which was of the same Origin as the "Ancient Ring" mark.

He began the most basic, yet most difficult "introspection" and "guidance". Relying on no external energy, only his own tenacious will to survive and absolute control over every subtle change in his body, he guided the almost exhausted Qi and blood, and the residual, scattered life energy within him, along the few most core and basic Meridians, beginning the most primitive circulation and transport, extremely slowly and with extreme difficulty.

It was like digging and dredging on a dried-up riverbed with the most primitive tools, attempting to draw the almost vanished, last wisp of living water from the source.

Pain. Indescribable pain. Every movement of Qi felt like scraping the inner walls of his fragile Meridians with a red-hot iron rod. But he ignored the pain, focusing all his spirit on "control" and "perseverance".

A thread, a thread, and another thread... the scattered life energy was forcibly gathered and guided. The damaged Meridians, driven by his will, struggled to perform their final functions. The "the key" mark on his chest seemed to sense his almost masochistic, tenacious effort, lighting up slightly—a pale golden glimmer that was slightly brighter and more stable than before—and emitting a gentle, nourishing energy of the same Origin as his own life energy, joining this slow circulation.

Although the total amount was still pitifully small, at least the almost stagnant, crumbling life cycle within him had begun to pulse again, extremely weakly but with unusual firmness.

Time, in this silent, dark blue "The Shelter", lost its clear scale once again.

I don't know how much time passed. When Ling Ye opened his eyes again slowly, although the fatigue in his eyes remained deep, the deathly gray decay had faded somewhat, replaced by a deep, cold, tempered fortitude. Although his body was still empty and his strength less than one-tenth of what it had been, at least the feeling that he might completely disintegrate and fall apart at any moment was gone. He had regained basic control over this broken body.

The "the key" mark on his chest was still dim, but it was no longer flickering; it was steadily emitting a faint, warm golden light, like a heart that had rested briefly and begun to pulse slowly again.

He looked at Old Shi. The ice-blue isolation layer still existed; the black cracks were successfully blocked outside the isolation layer. Although Old Shi's breathing was still weak, it was stable. For now, it had not deteriorated.

Ling Ye slowly stood up.