Just then, a grayish-white curtain slowly descended. The clacking of a wooden clapper pierced the dim yellow lamplight. Shadow Play Performance, part illusion, part reality, unfolded the life of the dead:
His name was Cangyang.
Most cultivators guarding the border had been conscripted from the various realms. He alone had been born and raised on the Returning Ruins Defense Line.
The Divine Court's defense line at the Returning Ruins had stood for ten thousand years. Though turmoil never ceased, its foundations had always held firm. Only in the past century had disturbances in the interlayer grown frequent and demonic calamities intensified, turning it into a river suspended overhead, liable to "burst its banks" at any moment.
From beginning to end, Cangyang's life had been bound to this blood-soaked defense line.
Both his parents had been border guards. They had defended the line for decades before finally perishing in an unforeseen incident.
They left only the young Cangyang behind on this desolate, icy battlefield.
In recognition of his parents' deaths in service and out of compassion for his lonely plight, the Divine Court issued several decrees to transfer him to a safe region in the rear.
Cangyang refused every time.
He had no home to return to, no native land to go back to. In his eyes and his heart, only this defense line, stained with his parents' blood, remained.
The fiends that had killed his loved ones still lurked in the interlayer. Until the Abyss was pacified, he refused to seek precarious peace in the rear.
Even if his strength alone was meager, even if his vengeance was a pale and distant hope, he insisted on remaining here.
The youth shed his childish innocence and, carrying a broken sword left behind, walked alone across the barren lands of the Returning