When his right leg starts to hurt and feel hot and infected starting at the foot, Jiang Cheng doesn't give it much mind, determined to ignore a weakness he won't permit himself. It isn't until the sores start, large and ugly and infected, followed by the skin turning blackened with a foul stench to it, that he realizes this is something that can't be ignored through sheer willpower.

He's still not going to ask anyone else for help. He can handle this by himself, handle it in the way of a cultivator.

So he can be found sitting at the edge of the lake by the boathouse he lives in, doing for hours and hours on end something which he usually keeps to the required minimum: meditating. Meditating and trying to use his cultivator's self-healing to fix the decay to his body faster than it can spread.

It is a doomed battle, one during which he feeds all his spiritual energy into the decaying wound yet it seems like the rot is only spreading faster for his exhaustion, and soon it leaves him weak even beyond the rotting limb - feverish, swaying, struggling with even the smallest effort. He still keeps the rotting limb stubbornly hidden.

"Don't be ridiculous!" he snaps, swaying in place. "I'm not infected! I have a golden core, I wouldn't be rotting away where I stand!"