"It's raining again."
At the watchtower of the Land of Gathering Demons camp, a sentry tugged at his straw raincoat and looked up at the sky thick with dark clouds. Lightning occasionally tore through the clouds, and thunder rumbled like the roar of ancient times. Heaven and earth were shrouded in a curtain of rain... The camp seemed to have become a lone boat on the sea.
"There was clearly a Golden Burning Cloud yesterday. How could there be such heavy rain today?" The man beside him was puzzled as well. The Golden Burning Cloud meant golden evening clouds, and whenever they appeared, the next day was usually sunny. Anyone with even a little knowledge of celestial phenomena could tell that today's weather was abnormal.
The old sentry in the watchtower took a puff from his pipe, blew out a ring of gray smoke, and said leisurely, "Malignant energy soars to the heavens, and heaven and earth turn upside down. There must be a great army passing through."
"Malignant energy?"
"Wherever there are heralds, there is bound to be a fearsome amount of malignant energy." The old sentry tapped his pipe. "Think about it. Don't heralds all enter secret realms to kill demons? The more powerful the herald, the more demons they kill. But what grudges do demons have against heralds? They stay properly inside their secret realms, neither going out to harm people nor fighting over territory, yet heralds barge into their homes and slaughter them at will. Killing them once isn't enough—they kill them tens of millions of times. Tell me, how could the demons bear no grudge?"
"Heralds have vigorous qi and blood, so the demons' resentment can't do anything to them. But it will cling to the heralds all the same, and over time, it turns