The fire spread ever farther, gradually setting nearly half the town ablaze.
Figures fled one after another from the corners where they had been hiding, running toward the gap deliberately left at the rear of town.
Against the somewhat gloomy weather, the firelight illuminated the surrounding ground ever more brightly.
Burning wooden buildings, townsfolk running about and occasionally letting out panicked screams, and rows of women and children under guard, kneeling in the square as they were interrogated.
Not far away, rows of crows watched with scarlet eyes, waiting for the people below to leave before pecking at the corpses.
"Moonlit Whale Chart?" Dong Baihua unfurled the ancient painting and carefully examined its contents.
A colossal pale-blue whale slowly surfaced beneath a crescent moon in the dark night, revealing a dense row of eyes like oil lamps.
Those eyes were evenly scattered across the right side of its cheek, like ghostly blue pearls growing from a reef.
Dark clouds crowded the sky in the painting. Great mountains rose and fell in the distance, while flashes of lightning streaked past, appearing and vanishing amid the clouds.
Judging from the details alone, the painting was indeed quite good, faintly carrying a certain special artistic conception.
Yet apart from the image itself, the ancient painting contained additional lines, brushwork, and colors that seemed meaningless.
These lines, brushstrokes, and colors made the whole painting seem slightly rough. Though those patches of color looked more like waves and mist,
they instead undermined the painting's overall artistic conception.
"The painting isn't bad." Dong Baihua put away the ancient painting, in fairly good spirits.
With her cultivation, she could naturally see that something special was hidden within the painting. Yet it was concealed too deeply to make out clearly.
She had seen many such things. During the