As the salty tang of rust fell upon her lips, a young woman's hazy consciousness returned.
She lay on the ground, staring blankly at the figure passing beside her. After a moment, she came to her senses and weakly reached for the person's ankle, but only barely brushed against it.
Yet the person still stopped.
"Who... exactly... are you?"
Four consecutive days of hunger and cold had pushed nearly every ordinary person in the birdcage to their limit. They might not even notice the taste of a single drop of blood, and even if they awakened from the brink of death, they would not know who had saved them. But a very small number of them had realized it.
The person fell silent for a moment, then slowly spoke two words into the wind:
"Phoenix."
With that, he turned and left, approaching the next dying ordinary person and dripping a drop of Phoenix blood into his mouth as well.
The girl murmured those two words. As a warm current rose within her body, she drifted back into unconsciousness.
Before anyone realized it,
dawn had arrived;
that night, the God of Death's scythe had failed to reap a single life,
because within this golden birdcage, a burning phoenix was baring its fangs and roaring at it!
The morning sun rose in the east. Golden light shone through a break in the dark clouds and onto the birdcage in the mountains... A blood-covered young woman sat cross-legged, facing the temple with her back to the people.
Her head hung low. Layer upon layer of gruesome blood scabs covered her back, looking beneath the morning sun as though she wore a golden cloak.
Creak—
The gates of the birdcage were opened by two guards.
"Huh... There are actually still so many people alive?"