"All living beings decay; only bones endure forever.
Corpse wax is offered in sacrifice; vital blood burns as kindling.
Flesh and blood are the sacrifice; bones are the steps.
All things return to ruins; immortal bones bear eternal witness."
Across the boundless earth, a long procession of people slowly advanced.
They wore clothes of every color and bore different appearances and adornments, yet all knelt and kowtowed in perfect unison, chanting the same hymn.
The procession stretched beyond sight, yet in one person's eyes, its end was visible.
At the end of the crowd stood a towering palace of bones!
It stood at the far end of the bone sea and Thousand Mountains, shrouded in a thin black mist of phosphorescent light.
The palace had not been built from ordinary stone or towering timber, but from countless skeletons, some ghastly white and some pitch-black.
The alternating black-and-white colors were exceptionally conspicuous across this land. Combined with the grand, towering structure, it resembled a slumbering giant beast standing upon the earth.
Luo Chen gazed solemnly into the distance, while Yuan Qingzang stared in shock at the endless crowd below.
"Those are the people of Chonghai Tower!"
"Why are warriors from Snow Rock Gorge here?"
"Hm? That elderly woman in that magnificent crimson gown—could she be an elder of the Red Lotus Department?"
As the master of Sky Pagoda Forest, Yuan Qingzang could not claim to know Return to Ruins like the back of his hand, but he still knew something of the large and small factions nearby.
From physical traits or distinctive attire alone, he quickly identified the origins of these people within the crowd.
Hearing names such as Chonghai Tower and the Red Lotus Department, Luo Chen matched them one by one with the memories in his mind.
When Gu