Chapter 220 Dying On The Floor
Chapter 220 Dying On The Floor
The deafening roar of the mob rushing into the warehouse was the last thing I heard before the world snapped into pitch black.
It wasn't a peaceful unconsciousness. I didn't drift into a quiet void. I was violently dragged downward into a freezing, suffocating ocean.
The Abyssal Blood-Venom had completely breached my Foundation Establishment core. Inside the dark theater of my own mind, I could physically feel the poison moving. It wasn't just a chemical; it possessed a malicious, predatory intent. It felt like thousands of microscopic, jagged ice crystals burrowing directly into the delicate, golden threads of my meridians.
I tried to fight back. I instinctively reached for my baseline Qi, trying to summon the warm, steady flow of energy I had cultivated over months of grueling meditation and combat.
A faint, golden spark ignited in the center of my chest.
The venom immediately swarmed it. The black, necrotic sludge crashed over the golden light, entirely smothering it in a fraction of a second. The backlash sent a shockwave of pure, unadulterated agony tearing through my nervous system.
My physical eyes snapped open.
The warehouse was a slaughterhouse.
I was lying on my back on the moldy canvas tarps, completely paralyzed from the neck down. My vision was swimming, the edges of the room blurred by dark, pulsing shadows.
Ten feet away, Baek Jin-Woo was a blood-soaked phantom.
The mob had flooded through the broken double doors, but they hadn't reached me. Jin-Woo had abandoned his defensive stance. He was fighting with an aggressive, suicidal ferocity that defied all Orthodox teachings. His deep blue robes were slashed to ribbons. Blood poured from the deep wound on his left shoulder, running down his arm and dripping off his fingertips.
A mercenary lunged at him with a heavy iron spear. Jin-Woo didn't parry. He stepped directly inside the thrust, letting the wooden shaft graze his ribs. He grabbed the mercenary by the throat with his injured left hand, ignoring the tearing of his own torn muscles, and drove his straight sword entirely through the man’s chest.
He kicked the dying man off his blade just in time to duck a horizontal swing from a rusted halberd.
"Get back!" Jin-Woo roared, his voice cracking, spitting blood onto the dirt. He unleashed a crescent-shaped wave of blue Qi, slicing the halberd in half and throwing the attacker backward into the mud.
I wanted to shout. I wanted to tell him to run, to leave me and save himself.
I opened my mouth, but my lungs refused to expand. A wet, sickening gurgle was the only sound I made. Thick, freezing foam bubbled past my lips.
My vision violently flickered, transitioning from the damp reality of the warehouse back to the terrifying, glitching red glow of the system interface.
\[CRITICAL ALERT: Meridian Network Collapse at 89%.\]
\[Foreign Contaminant has breached the myocardial wall.\]
The flashing text didn't just hover in my vision; it burned.
I stared at the red letters, a cold, terrifying realization settling over my fading consciousness.
Since the day I woke up in this timeline, I had lived in absolute fear of the system's rules. I had obsessively checked my Karma balance, terrified that if I dropped below the threshold, the system would execute its 'Existence Erasure' protocol. I thought the system was the ultimate judge, the only thing that held the power of life and death over my second chance.
I was wrong.
The system was just a framework. It sat on top of a physical, biological body. And that body was currently dying.
The Abyssal Blood-Venom didn't care about my Karma. It didn't care about my quests or my redemption. It was rapidly rotting my internal organs into black, necrotic mush. My physical heart was going to stop beating, my brain was going to starve of oxygen, and I was going to turn into a rotting corpse on this damp canvas long before the system's existence erasure ever triggered.
I was dying the old-fashioned way.
The cold reached my fingertips. It crept up my forearms, heavy and numb. The sensation of the damp canvas beneath my palms completely vanished.
I slipped under again.
The darkness returned, thicker this time. The agony in my chest began to fade, replaced by a terrifying, hollow warmth. It was the feeling of my body giving up, of my nervous system shutting down the pain receptors to prepare for the end.
I floated in the void. The memories of my past life began to bleed into the darkness. I saw the faces of the clan leaders I had assassinated. I saw the blood on the snow outside the Shadow Hall. I saw the burning stalls of the merchants I had failed to save in Yeomna.
I had been given a second chance. I had endured having my bones crushed, my reputation destroyed, and my body pushed to the absolute brink, all to prove I wasn't the monster I used to be.