Heartbeat in the Darkness

The air inside the stone coffin grew thicker and more stagnant with each passing moment. It was a slow, torturous process of suffocation, like a venomous snake gradually tightening its coils around its prey's neck. Every breath Jiang Ying took felt like swallowing coarse sand; every rise and fall of her chest was accompanied by a dull ache, as if countless invisible needles were piercing her lungs.

Yet even more terrifying was the cold.

The chilling阴气 emanating from Pei Ji was far beyond ordinary低温. It was a deathly stillness-cold that could pierce flesh and freeze the marrow of one's bones. Jiang Ying wore a thin red silk wedding dress—a garment meant for joy and dignity, now turned into a death warrant. She couldn't stop shivering, her frail body bumping against the hard stone walls, making faint sounds.

Her hands, bound behind her back, had long gone numb. Poor blood circulation had turned her fingertips a sickly blue-purple. Yet she still held tightly to the rusty iron nail, even though its sharp edge had cut through the skin of her palm, spilling warm blood. That was the only warmth she could still feel—the warmth of the living.

"You're trembling." Pei Ji's voice rang out abruptly in the darkness, carrying a condescending scrutiny, as if observing a dying prey.

"I'm cold." Jiang Ying did not hide it, nor could she. She clenched her teeth, trying her best to keep them from chattering. This physiological instinct seemed so pathetic and ridiculous before absolute power.

"Cold?" Pei Ji spoke as if he had heard some novel word, his tone thick with mockery. He seemed to enjoy this cat-and-mouse game. "Can't stand even this much cold? Then do you know what it feels like to lie in this stone coffin for a thousand years, with even your soul frozen solid?"

His voice suddenly turned harsh, filled with violence and rancor. It wasn't merely coldness—it was the despair of being forgotten by the world, abandoned by time.

Before his words faded, he abruptly reached out and grabbed Jiang Ying's wrist with unerring precision in the darkness.

"Ah!" A short gasp escaped Jiang Ying. His hand felt like a block of ice that had remained frozen for ten thousand years. The bone-chilling cold spread instantly up her arm, as if it would freeze all the blood in her body.

Pei Ji's fingers roughly groped the ropes around her wrist. The hempen rope was tied extremely tightly, biting into her flesh—a dead knot deliberately tied by the coarse servants of the Jiang family to prevent her from escaping. He seemed somewhat impatient with this mortal trinket and snorted, applying force with his fingers.

With a muffled "bang," the thick hempen rope was ripped cleanly apart by his bare hands, effortlessly.

The severed rope slithered away like a decapitated snake. The instant her hands were freed, blood rushed back into her numb limbs, bringing an ache and pins-and-needles sensation even harder to bear than the numbness. But Jiang Ying ignored it. She immediately hid the iron nail tightly in her palm, then instinctively shrank back, pressing her body against the icy stone wall, trying to put distance between them.

"What? Not cold anymore now?" Pei Ji sensed her movement, his mockery deepening. He could feel her fear—an emotion he was all too familiar with, and the one he detested most. The faces of those who had nailed him here a thousand years ago had worn the same expression.

"Th-thank you, General." Jiang Ying rubbed her wrist, marked with rope burns, forcing herself to calm down. Her voice, though still trembling, had lost some of its panic and gained a strained composure.

"Thank me? I'm not being charitable." Pei Ji said coldly, as if stating an irrefutable fact. "Since you claim you can help break the seal, if you freeze to death, who would I turn to?"

He paused, his tone turning sinister, like a snake flicking its tongue. "Besides, keeping you alive means I can torment you slowly."

Jiang Ying's heart sank. She knew she was making a deal with a tiger. This man—no, this ghost king—had no ordinary human compassion. He was mercurial in mood, swift in killing, and a thousand years of imprisonment had warped his mind. He could take her life at any moment, as easily as crushing an ant.

Silence fell again inside the stone coffin. Only the sound of their breathing—one shallow, one deep—echoed in the confined space. Jiang Ying's breath was rapid and shallow, like a fish stranded on dry land; Pei Ji's was long and heavy, each inhalation seeming to drain the thinning air around them.

Jiang Ying closed her eyes—though opening them made no difference—and tried hard to recall what Master Void had said outside earlier, those words that had sounded to her like obscure scripture.

"Thousand-Year Frozen Ice Curse... the Pure Yang Blood of one with an Extreme Yin Physique..."

She didn't know how the Pure Yang Blood was to be used. Would it require draining all her blood, like a sacrificial offering? Or just a few drops? She had to find out—this was her only bargaining chip for survival.

"What are you thinking?" Pei Ji keenly detected the change in her breathing rhythm. Not the slightest fluctuation escaped his perception.

"I'm thinking... about how to help the General break the seal." Jiang Ying replied cautiously, trying to find a thread of survival in her words.

"Oh? Have you figured it out?" Pei Ji's tone held undisguised contempt. He didn't believe a mortal woman—and a blind one at that—could know anything about breaking formation techniques. Back then, the array that trapped him had been laid by dozens of top-tier Arcane Cultivators, consuming countless precious materials and painstaking effort.

"I heard the Daoist say my blood is needed," Jiang Ying said without concealment. At a time like this, honesty was perhaps the only path to survival. Deceiving a monster who had lived a thousand years would be suicide. "But I don't know what to do. Does the General... know?"

Pei Ji fell silent.

For a thousand years, he had tried countless times to break through this accursed stone coffin. Every struggle had only brought him the pain of having his soul torn apart. That Frozen Ice Curse was like an invisible net, binding him tightly, wearing down his strength and will bit by bit.

Blood.

Of course, he knew the use of blood. Back then, to suppress him, they had not only used the Frozen Ice Curse but had also painted the coffin's interior with cinnabar and black dog blood, covering every surface with runes. Those runes were like brands on his soul, scorching him every moment, causing him endless agony.

Only the blood of one with an Extreme Yin Physique could neutralize the power of those阳刚 runes. And if that blood also carried a trace of Pure Yang energy, it could not only break the seal but even... allow him to reforge a physical body and restore the power he had once prided himself on.

But he didn't want to tell her.

He hated this feeling of being passive, of having to rely on a weak mortal. It made him feel like a beggar, a humiliation worse than death to him.

"I don't know." He spat out the three words stiffly, like cold stones hitting the ground.

Jiang Ying was startled. If even he didn't know, were they going to die here together? Was this only spark of hope about to be extinguished?

The air grew thinner still. The suffocation was no longer a slow strangulation but an urgent pressing. Jiang Ying felt dizzy, her consciousness beginning to blur. Phantoms that didn't exist appeared before her eyes—colorful patches of light dancing in her originally pitch-black field of vision. She knew this was a sign of extreme oxygen deprivation.

She couldn't wait any longer. If she waited, she wouldn't even have the strength to cut her own palm.

She took a deep breath, forcing herself to muster one last shred of resolve. If death was inevitable, she would die trying to live, not waiting for it to come.

"General, forgive my impertinence."

Before her words faded, she raised the rusty iron nail and, without hesitation, slashed it across her palm. There was no hesitation, as if the hand weren't her own.

"Hiss—" A piercing pain shot through her as the nail's rusted edge tore through skin and flesh. Warm blood gushed out instantly. Droplets of blood fell onto the cold stone slab, producing the faintest "drip" sound.

In the dark, dead silence of the stone coffin, the smell of blood instantly spread. It was an extremely unique scent.

It was the blood of the living.

The blood of a Pure Yin Physique, yet for some unknown reason carrying a trace of extremely霸道 Pure Yang energy.

Pei Ji's breathing abruptly stopped.

For a thousand years, he had smelled nothing so alluring. The scent was like a flame, instantly igniting his long-parched soul. His Adam's apple bobbed, and his eyes glowed with a faint green light in the darkness, like a wolf starving to death, fixed on Jiang Ying's bleeding palm. That craving was an instinct that had crossed a thousand years of time.

"Are you insane?!" He lunged at her, grabbing her bleeding wrist. His grip was so strong it nearly crushed her bones.

"I'm not insane." Jiang Ying's voice was weak but carried an unyielding determination. "If we don't try, we'll both die."

She struggled, trying to smear the blood on the stone walls. She didn't know where the runes were, so she could only fumble blindly like a headless fly, trying to find a path to survival in the darkness.

"Don't move!" Pei Ji growled, his voice straining with an emotion about to explode.

His fingers touched her warm blood. At that instant, a strange power flowed through his fingertips like a bursting dam, flooding into his body. It was a relief like rain after a long drought. The burning pain deep in his soul miraculously lessened by a trace. It was as if his parched meridians had finally received sweet dew.

It really worked.

Turbulent waves surged in Pei Ji's heart.

He looked at the blind woman before him—pale-faced, trembling all over, yet still biting her lips tightly without uttering a single moan. She was obviously terrified, so scared that even her breath quivered, yet she could be so ruthless with herself. This fierceness, this obsession to survive, actually stirred a hint of strange familiarity in him.

"Where do I apply it?" Jiang Ying asked breathlessly. Her strength was draining away with her blood. The world began to spin, and her voice grew faint and distant.

Pei Ji did not answer. His gaze was fixed on her palm, where blood kept flowing, radiating a lethal allure.

He suddenly lowered his head and took her bleeding palm into his mouth.

Jiang Ying's whole body jolted. Her eyes flew wide open. Though she still couldn't see, her face was filled with shock, disbelief, and extreme terror.

"You..."

His ice-cold tongue licked her wound with a kind of hair-raising greed and urgency. Pei Ji was drinking her blood.

This was not merely breaking the seal; it was more like some ancient, sinister ritual. A ritual of plunder and being plundered.

As her blood flowed away, Jiang Ying's consciousness grew hazier. She felt as if she were floating in icy seawater, sinking little by little, the surrounding light being devoured by darkness. She wanted to struggle but didn't even have the strength to lift a finger.

Just as she was about to lose consciousness completely, a violent tremor suddenly shook the stone coffin. This tremor did not come from outside but erupted from within the material of the coffin itself.

The runes carved into the stone walls—long since fused with the coffin—seemed awakened like savage beasts upon contact with the strange power in Jiang Ying's blood, beginning to emit a blinding red light. Then, accompanied by cracking sounds, the intangible, indestructible force that had shrouded the coffin for a millennium was torn open like a wound by a sharp blade.

Pei Ji lifted his head abruptly, her crimson blood still staining his lips, looking especially eerie in the dim coffin.

He could feel it.

A thousand years of sealing—finally loosened.

Without hesitation, he gathered the trace of power he had just recovered. Though faint, it was enough for the array that had already been torn open. He drove his fist into the stone slab above his head.

"Boom—"

A deafening explosion. The heavy stone lid that had pressed down on him for a thousand years was blasted away by an immense force, smashing onto the earth outside with a dull thud.

Long-lost air rushed in instantly. Carrying the acrid smell of soil, carrying the chill of the night.

Jiang Ying breathed greedily. The fresh air stung her collapsed lungs, triggering a violent fit of coughing, but the pain filled her with immense relief.

She had survived.

Pei Ji rose slowly from the stone coffin. After a thousand years of imprisonment, he had finally seen the light of day again. He raised his head, gazing at the pale crescent moon in the night sky. Though it was still dark, the faint moonlight was unbearably bright to his eyes—so bright it nearly made him weep.He took a deep breath, feeling the wind brush against his cheeks. This was the taste of freedom.

He turned his head to look at Jiang Ying, who was still slumped limply in the sarcophagus. She curled up in the corner like a broken ragdoll, her red wedding dress stained with dirt and blood, her face pale as paper, blood still dripping from her palm.

Pei Ji's gaze grew complicated.

This blind woman had saved him. A useless creature who couldn't even control her own fate had actually unraveled the deadlock that had trapped him for a thousand years.

But he didn't need a savior. He, Pei Ji, was born to control everything.

He bent down, his cold fingers once again gripping her chin, forcing her to lift her head. Even though she couldn't see anything, he enjoyed this sense of居高临下的 control.

"You did well." His voice was particularly deep in the night wind, carrying a hint of subtle amusement. "As a reward, I've decided—I won't kill you, for now."

Jiang Ying smiled weakly, a trace of bitterness, mockery, and a sliver of post-escape relief in that smile.

"The general's reward is truly... generous."

Pei Ji's eyes darkened. He didn't like that tone of hers. That tone that seemed to see through everything, yet was powerless to do anything about it.

Just then, the sound of chaotic footsteps and the glow of torches came from afar, breaking the silence of the night.

"Hurry! Over there! There was movement just now!"

"Don't let that damned girl escape! If we miss the appointed time, the mistress won't let us off!"

It was the Jiang family. They had heard the loud crash of the sarcophagus breaking and had brought the servants to investigate.

Jiang Ying's heart immediately leaped to her throat. If she was caught and brought back, Madam Jiang would never let her off. What awaited her would be a torment worse than death.

"General..." She instinctively grabbed the corner of Pei Ji's robe. The fabric had become somewhat fragile after a thousand years, but she gripped it tightly, as if holding onto her last lifeline. "Take me away."

Pei Ji looked down at her bloodied hand, then at the torches drawing closer in the distance. A cruel smile curled at the corner of his lips.

"Beg me."