The King's Mate - Part 2: Yaoshi

Chapter 26

Hua Cheng had done his best for the last 41 days to ensure his gege's survival.

He hadn't dared to leave his side unless it had been absolutely unavoidable.

He had spent every moment wracking his brain for solutions for any possible scenarios and situations that could develop at any given moment.

In fact, he had just been waiting for something to go wrong. For something to happen that Hua Cheng had forgotten to take into consideration.

But now that he'd finally figured out how to use this small piece of pure, white jade, there was really only one more hurdle to overcome. If Hua Cheng was honest, this was the part of the procedure he was the most anxious about.

It was true that the piece was small, and infused with a frankly absurd amount of magic. But in order for all this magic to work on his gege, it needed to be applied on his skin.

The problem was that his gege's skin was still completely covered in angry, red rashes all over, and Hua Cheng's initial plan was to find a spot that was free of injury or rashes.

Sadly though, such a spot didn't exist.

Hua Cheng had to grudgingly accept that his initial plan was impossible to realise, and thus he decided to go with the next best option, and place it where YanLi had said was a common location to insert such an object.

Which was at the base of the neck.

Granted, it was a bit difficult to reach, and Hua Cheng truly didn't want to move his gege, but the sooner he gave his gege the means to help him heal himself, the better.

Hua Cheng combed his gege's hair to the side gently, but efficiently, making sure that not a single strand would get in his way, before he carefully moved his gege's torso to the front just a little bit, to give him better access to the nape of his neck.

When these preparations were done, Hua Cheng took a deep breath to steady his nerves, and pushed the white jade against the nape lightly, not applying much pressure at all. However, the jade began moving of its own accord after just a short moment, sinking deeper into his gege's skin, until there was only a tiny piece of it visible.

At this point, Hua Cheng realised that he'd been holding his breath for the whole process, and sighed a breath of relief. He'd half expected for his gege to react badly to the intrusion, but nothing immediate happened. There wasn't even any blood from the intrusion. Usually, Hua Cheng would think that it was because of the smooth surface of the stone, but he knew that couldn't be the reason. Any intrusion that sank this deep into the skin should have caused a bleeding wound. To Hua Cheng, this proved that the magic was already working on his gege, and it was why he found the courage to touch the tiny piece of jade that jutted out.

By touching it, Hua Cheng could control the barrier he'd placed inside the jade.

Thankfully, barriers were very malleable things, and could be formed into any given shape, anywhere the creator wanted. In fact, Hua Cheng had spent some time testing the limits of these barriers very well, and he'd come to the conclusion that there were essentially none.

He'd even placed barriers inside the people he'd used for his poison testing before, and none of them had seemed like they had even noticed. Of course, Hua Cheng couldn't have been sure if it was because they had already been numbed because of his poison, so out of curiosity, he'd even placed one in his own arm. And he had not felt a single thing.

Afterwards, he'd tested it again on those that had yet to be poisoned by him, and had even asked them if they felt anything crawling underneath their skin. And while some of them had panicked at the implication, all of them had eventually told him that they didn't feel anything.