Chen Feng hovered in the freezing air, his chest heaving violently, his face distorted into a mask of pure, primal agony.
Clutched desperately against his bare, blood-streaked torso were the two thin, leathery sheets of skin carved from the faces of his mother and father.
His knuckles were bone-white; his breath emerged in ragged, hitching sobs that shook his entire muscular frame.
The luminescence of his newly forged Saint cultivation was flickering wildly, polluted by the thick, vein-like cords of dark crimson fury that coiled outward from his heart, hissing as they corroded the pure draconic qi he had refined through eight grueling years of dimensional torment.
Standing above, perfectly balanced upon the invisible currents of the upper firmament, Haoran watched the weeping protagonist with the detached, unhurried curiosity of a scholar studying an insect pinned beneath glass.
