White bones lay like frost, covering the entire plaza at the bottom of the tower.
The skeletons were sprawled in all kinds of positions. Some were frozen in the final struggle of their lives.
Some curled up like infants; others lay on their backs, their empty eye sockets gazing into eternal darkness.
The years had eaten away at the color of the bones, but they had not erased the resentment soaring into the sky—the despair of countless cultivators in their final moments, imprisoned in this tiny place for a thousand years without fading.
The sword marks on the stone walls varied in depth and crisscrossed one another, as though a silent slaughter had been frozen in time.
The deepest gash nearly split the entire wall in two. Faint traces of Sword Qi still lingered along its edges, like sparks that refused to die.
Deep.
Silent.
As if beyond the mortal world.
Ye Honglian and Ji Yaoguang stood shoulder to shoulder. Their breathing sounded especially clear in the deathly silence.
No snowflakes drifted inside the tower, yet a faint, ghostly blue light seeped from deep within the stone walls, illuminating the forest of white bones strewn across the ground.
That glow was cold and eerie, as if it came from the netherworld.
In the silence, where even a heartbeat seemed unbearably loud, a sigh rang out without warning.
At first, it was so faint it might have been an illusion.
But in the next instant, the sigh spread like a rising tide. It came from no single direction, but from all around them—
It rose eerily from the hollow cavities of every bone, from the gaps in every sword mark, from deep within the stone walls, and even from the ground beneath their feet.
A clap of thunder seemed to fall