Thereafter, he glanced at Zhou Zishu and said, “His meridians are clear and wide. He is excellent material to work with in the first place, but his ability to grasp concepts is too poor, and conversely he has more difficulty than any other to figure out the path...yes, you can push him a little further; anyway, he won’t be dying anytime soon.”

Most thankfully, Zhang Chengling had merely fainted.

Because of Zhang Chengling, that day, the other three decided to find a place to stay and wait a night for this little tyke to recover before entering the mountains. As usual, Zhou Zishu was punctually tortured into wakefulness at midnight by the nails in him. He curled up into a ball, fingers pressing on his chest, but he did not use his internal energy to suppress it. He only laid on the bed with his eyes open, staring at the moonlight shining in through the window, looking as if he was in a daze--he was intimately experiencing the sensation of those nails in his body.

Compared to before, the Three Autumn Nails of the Seven Acupunctures did not only hurt when they acted up now. The original sensation that felt like someone was using a small knife to rummage around in his chest appeared to have lessened, or it might have been that he had already grown numb to it. Conversely, there was a new, gradual sensation of something weighing down on his chest that caused his breath to stutter between exhalations, and it seemed to have grown more and more distinct over the past few days.

Zhou Zishu knew that this was some kind of omen--of the three years, slightly less than half of it had already passed.

A long time ago, he had always thought that these three additional years were a sort of kindness. But he only knew now that it was, in fact, another form of cruel torture.

Death did not scare him--for the past twenty-odd years, it had not been easy for him to survive till today. All the techniques he had used to force Zhang Chengling to pick up gongfu were ones that he had suffered through when he was younger; he had suffered even more merciless ones, and he did not even have that child’s natural gift to stand that harshness without the slightest bit of damage. He had lived through so much, experienced so many events that he was unafraid of anyone or anything on this earth. If he was fearless in life, what was so terrifying about death?

However, what agonised him were these three years, in which he had to count down the days as he awaited his death.