In the howling cold wind, orange-red flames leaped and danced, devouring corpse after corpse frozen blue.
Last night, Zhang Yang's minor avatar became an orphan once again. His uncle, aunt, and cousin Xing Yu had all died, their causes of death unknown.
Yet this was not the only family in the village to suffer. Forty-five men, women, old and young, had died violent deaths.
"It must be the Black Devil. The Black Devil has returned. It stole their souls and wove them into a black fishing net. Before the net is finished, even more people will die."
An old woman wearing a heavy beast-hide coat and a huge beast's-head helmet whispered beside the bonfire. Her face and hands were covered in strange patterns. She seemed to be the Witch Incantation Elder of the village, responsible for teaching all the children Basic Witch Speech. Her status appeared to be quite high.
Zhang Yang hid among the crowd, silently observing everything. He was only fourteen years old, nearly two meters tall and weighing almost two hundred kilograms. Yet among the Xing Clan, whose adults stood five meters tall and weighed eight hundred kilograms on average, he was truly small and frail.
It was worth mentioning that even in this tiny village, there were seven or eight villagers whose strength was close to the demigod level.
But this was not a good sign.
Because it meant that the Heavenly Dao of this world had already begun to slip out of control. As a result, fortune and merit had become skewed, while the Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi had fallen into either blind eruption or blind desiccation.
That legendary description of gods walking everywhere while demigods were worse than dogs was actually exposing a fact: this world was about to collapse. No matter how