I caught the falling Heavenly Demon and looked to Yarang.
Then I turned my gaze aside, to one direction. Within the torn dimension, ragged patches of golden, glimmering energy.
Something was different.
I had ridden that to get here, yes, but this was a dissonance I hadn’t sensed at the time.
I clutched my chest with a hand. Energy flowed within. And I could feel my condition.
The energies that had originally been in my body were still scattered through my flesh. At the same time, there was a difference.
“There’s no vessel.”
The vessel that should have held the energy was gone.
It felt like it was just bobbing up weightless in empty air.
How could this be? I wondered—but
I had already gone through too much to carry that question any further.
“Once again,”
the Ancestor had told me,
“this state can last at most for an instant. Before that ends, you must choose.”
The time I could endure with a broken vessel was, at most, not even half a…