A deep-blue hexagram array silently bloomed in the void, like ripples spreading across the surface of water.
The next second, Han Yuchen held Leng Yuebai's cool hand and stepped steadily out of the spatial gate, landing on the top floor of the Star Gazing Pavilion.
The two stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down from above at the once-incomparably prosperous heart of the empire.
Heaven Dou City had now completely become a dead city.
No—more precisely, it was a purgatory forcibly trapped under an overturned glass bowl by a higher-dimensional power.
A dark-purple hemispherical barrier fit seamlessly against the towering ancient walls of Heaven Dou City. The noon sunlight was shut out completely by that nauseating layer of viscous energy. The whole world was as dim as dusk, and the air was filled with a stench mixed with blood, burning, and some indescribable rot.
"Whoosh—"
A bone-chilling wind swept in from the end of the street, scraping past the upturned eaves of the Star Gazing Pavilion and letting out a shrill howl like wailing ghosts and wolves.
With that sinister wind, snowflakes began to drift down from the sky.
It was not pure, crystalline winter snow, but pure, dead black.
The black snow fell in great flurries, like ashes of bone dancing across the sky, silently coating broad street after broad street and settling on the resplendent glazed tiles.
"Hiss, hiss..."
The black snow melted the moment it touched the ground, turning into puddles of foul-smelling black slime. The hard bluestone slabs were corroded into pitted holes, with wisps of dark-purple toxic smoke rising from them.
On the streets, the civilians who had already fallen into extreme panic because of the upheaval in the imperial palace were now fleeing everywhere like headless flies.
A young mother holding an infant fell in