Chapter 310: Scars

If forced to find a word to describe it, Kraft felt he was experiencing severe... phantom limb pain.

He moved his spine, arms, legs, and fingers in sequence from top to bottom; there were only minor scrapes and bumps caused by the jolting, all confined to the surface layer, with nothing missing.

The pain lay in other things.

In his self-perception, a large amount of superfluous parts had appeared; the extra "limbs" were delivering negative sensations that occupied his entire consciousness to his awareness.

It was an extreme agony, as if hands and feet were folded in a tiny space, unable to stretch, with tissues suffering from poor blood flow first becoming sore and swollen, then stinging, finally progressing to necrosis, yet the nerves within had not died, still faithfully transmitting the pain of constriction and hunching, with the pain itself sinking into endless, endless decay with no end.

It was not a fabrication, but something actually existing, pressing heavily upon his consciousness.

The cultivators, flustered and scrambling, could not feel these things; they were working together to drag the professor, who had lost the ability to move, out of the standing water, preventing the latter from drowning in the boat due to his immobility.

Then they were powerless.

As professional armed personnel, they indeed knew a little about on-the-spot first aid, though limited to unbuttoning collars for ventilation, checking for serious external injuries, and perhaps some hemostatic bandaging.

Normally, this was not considered a shortcoming; as long as they could hold on until the doctor arrived, it would suffice.

But now, they were lost in a murky expanse, accompanied by darkness and floating debris, and the only doctor in the group looked like he needed a doctor himself.

If it were only this, it would not be utterly terrible. After all, similar experiences were not the first; those surging torrents of pain flooded the consciousness, and receded like floods, though the softening of the spiritual foundation would take some time to manifest.

Even Father Green, who had been most affected, barely recovered, propping up his head to organize order.

The two were responsible for stabilizing Kraft; those with remaining strength did their best to find containers and bail the water out of the boat; the rest sorted through the remaining supplies to find something that could restore an open flame.

Perhaps driven by the idea that surviving a great disaster must be followed by good fortune, they psychologically assumed some kind of luck or even divine protection, or believed that nothing could be so coincidentally surviving the disaster alongside them, so they no longer made much effort to conceal their movements.

Only a few minutes passed before they realized their idea was completely wrong.

A cultivator bending over to bail water happened to notice a patch of light in front of him as he looked up.

He initially thought it was a normal phenomenon of excessive fatigue and paid little attention, until he began to wonder why it did not move with his field of vision, but was obscured by the gunwale when he lowered his head.

When he looked up again, the patch of light had become slightly larger.

By the time everyone received the warning, that thing had already approached a dangerous distance, trailing a spreading fluorescent track behind it, with some glowing fluid leaking from a wound, like a meteor in the water.

Judging by mere visual estimation, its size was no less than that of the boat's hull.

They did not know what it was, but that light, that pale and cold Bai Guang, was a memory that could not be erased.

Some cultivators tried to row away, but the half-full hull was slow and sluggish, useless except for wasting strength.

Green, bracing his feet, drew the heavy crossbow again; the string, woven from mixed materials, was soaked through by the water, the slack and sluggish feeling like pulling a tightly wrung wet rag, causing a severe drop in accuracy.

The arrow, also fished out of the water, shot out and crookedly splashed a flower of water beside the patch of light; this was the most powerful counterattack they could mount before a close-quarters encounter.

There would be no second chance; before the painfully slow reloading process was complete, it would arrive right before them.

His arms could still pick up weapons, but that was only picking them up; coldness and exhaustion pulled his arms downward, causing them to tremble lightly uncontrollably.

It was even closer; they could even see how it moved, several flexible limbs extending and retracting to propel it forward, rising toward the water's surface. The light grew ever more vigorous, originating from a raised light-tumor, flickering uncertainly among the densely distributed branching structures on its surface.

Consciousness began to falter, making it seem like a pair of soft arms, opening fingers as fine as hair, reaching out to embrace a lost traveler in the darkness.

Overlapping sounds like a requiem spread with the bubbles, surrounding the exhausted spirit, making it very difficult to refuse the choice of surrendering to them.

Then they heard the sound of water beside them.

With no one to help, Kraft, who had slipped back into the water again, clung to the gunwale. The suffocating sensation of water in his lungs temporarily overshadowed the spiritual pain for a moment, only to be stimulated by something suddenly intruding, causing his main consciousness to briefly awaken.

The spiritual senses had long been disconnected, or at least they should have been, yet he could still clearly feel those illusory existences; perhaps this was their true essence—the other part that was always being denied and could never be escaped.

But what obviously needed to be thought about now was not this, but the roaming painful cognition.

Clarity was more painful than chaos; pain drove the consciousness to generate an extremely sharp will to destroy.

The foreign object embedded in his left arm was nearing its activation state, synchronizing with the boiling spiritual body, responding to that will, urgently wanting to tear apart everything around it—the boat, the lake water, the darkness, and even...

【This suppressed layer】

The consciousness wanted to do so, and could do so.

The phenomenon of tearing was an expression of pain; he had fully resonated with that pain, so naturally he could express it as well.

The body, which had been spasming irregularly just a moment before, suddenly erupted with astonishing strength, pushing the figure in front of him away.

The muscle bundles in his left arm tightened the skin, blood vessels swelled, and he struck down with the force of a sword swing, landing on the water's surface and splashing up a large spray of water.

Something happened; the commotion was less than even the gentlest water ripples, known only to the initiator; it was the bitter fruit brewed from the most terrible torment, the spiritual body's pain transformed through this into a scar in the physical world.

A slender line appeared out of nowhere, itself without any color, as if a transparent hair strand lay between the boat and the approaching light source. But a new flow immediately formed around it, as if its appearance brought about a massive change in water pressure, stirring up the silt along its trajectory, thus becoming visible in the water.

This brought a glimmer of hope; several pairs of eyes stared at the strip formed by the turbid vortex, with no spare capacity to think about where it came from or what connection it had to the patient's abrupt movement.

The hope lasted only for a few breaths; the Bai Guang passed through the boundary unimpeded, showing not the slightest sign of obstruction, no harder than passing through an illusion.

The glowing creature continued to approach at a constant speed for a stretch, raising its limbs... the front half of its limbs.

The proximal end connected to the main body was swinging, while the distal end remained in its original position.

Its movement exhibited a certain disconnection, causing it to pause in an incomprehensible manner, followed by a complete stagnation, losing all power.

They watched that patch of light silently sink, splitting into two completely unrelated pieces before being utterly swallowed by the dark abyss beneath the silt.