At that very moment, in an old house in a small town hundreds of kilometers away.
A middle-aged man, blind in one eye, had a deathly pallor beneath his dark skin. His entire face had become utterly distorted by extreme, unrelenting despair.
He had watched his elderly father, his skeletal older sister, and his young son become corpses, laid out right before him.
His one remaining, clouded eye saw a blurry figure staring fixedly at him, never looking away.
He hooked his neck into the White Cloth hanging from the roof beam. After enduring days of his loved ones dying horrific deaths and being tormented by terror, he finally could not take it anymore and chose a quiet way out.
His black cloth shoes kicked over the stool beneath him. Both feet began to tremble violently, his body struggling instinctively before death.
His remaining eye opened wider than it ever had in his life. The last time it had come close was more than a decade ago, when Xie Zheng had driven the sharp prong of a belt buckle into his other eye...
He could see that twisted figure still watching him, watching.
The long process of hanging gave him ample time to feel fear and regret. In fact, he regretted it in the second second after the cloth tightened around his neck.
He finally understood the terror of death. It was not something a man like him could withstand.
His tongue began turning black and purple, his face continued to contort, and filthy saliva dripped down. He wanted to speak, wanted to call for help, and stretched both arms far out in front of him.
And just after he had fully tasted the terror of death, the cloth hanging from the beam inexplicably snapped.
His whole body crashed to