A boundless force crashed down like a waterfall from the heavens, washing heaven, earth, and all things into a chaos of tangled lines.
Beneath that despair-inducing pressure, all bodily functions and thoughts froze solid, leaving utter blankness within and without.
Vitality was forced out through the pores, vanishing like smoke and dispersing like clouds...
"Saint King, Saint King..."
"Please forgive me, Saint King. This lowly one has offended you, but news has arrived from outside."
The voice came from afar, then suddenly flooded Ming Qiu Mang's ears, jolting him awake from the nightmare.
Ming Qiu Mang abruptly opened his eyes. Seeing powerful witchfolk experts kneeling all over the ground, he raised a hand to indicate that all was well.
More precisely, he had not been dreaming. At his realm, no nightmare would dare seek him out.
That horrifying scene had come from the depths of his memory. It was the final moment when the "him" of the past had failed to lift the Nine Cauldrons and been crushed until his soul scattered.
The terror of the Nine Cauldrons and the difficulty of becoming a Martial Saint had become an inescapable shadow over his heart.
Even now, that final scene constantly surfaced before his eyes, leaving him unable to break free.
"What is it?"
The moment Ming Qiu Mang spoke, the Spirit Mechanism Gu scattered in all directions gathered their information, reconstructing the entire course of events in the blink of an eye.
As the thoughts of those witchfolk experts turned, he had already read every scrap of their thinking.
"I already know!"
Ming Qiu Mang said slowly. Several people who ought to have been dead for years had actually swaggered back into the light of day.
Interesting. Whose hand had reached into the northern lands this time?
Ten Thousand Poison