"Caw—"
Dead silence!
Utter, absolute dead silence! Everyone seemed to hear the sound of an invisible crow cawing from the distant sky.
Burning Qin, Boiling Crane; Wuxiu of the Saint Slave; Sang Qiye of the Tiansang Spirit Palace...
This giant of the Five Domains, once famed throughout the world, revered and hated by countless people, was now so miserable he did not even have a straw sandal to cover his shame.
His filthy, charred toes were exposed nakedly beneath the gaze of the masses, clawing desperately into the ground.
His body jolted as if struck by lightning, trembling like a sieve.
His silence was deafening.
The world suddenly turned gray and white, stripped of all reason. Elder Sang's vacant gaze unconsciously swept across the many people around him...
So many people! Truly, so many people! Never before had Elder Sang felt that the Relics of the Gods were so crowded, as though billions upon billions of people had been crammed into this place.
Every face was holding back laughter, and every gaze directed at him brimmed with mockery.
So noisy!
Never before had Elder Sang realized that a world of dead silence could be so deafeningly clamorous:
The sound of boots scraping across gravel...
The rustle of clothes tightening around fingers...
Breathing, sniffling, the faint sounds of shoulders trembling despite all attempts to suppress them...
Even the repeated booms from the distant battlefield seemed deliberately aimed at assaulting his soul, their target clearer than the pursuit of godhood and ancestral supremacy.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Like heavy hammers, strike after strike, rich with rhythm, pinning his wounded heart against an anvil and smashing it into a bloody pulp.
But if it could truly rot away now, if he could simply die now, what a blissful and wonderful thing that would be!