Perhaps Dawn no longer remembered everything that had happened.
But she had kept every honor she had ever earned close to her heart.
The scene before her brought back memories of a small city she had liberated when she was in her early twenties.
It was a slave city in the middle of the desert.
It consisted of one slave owner and nearly twenty thousand slaves.
The slave owner branded the soul of every newborn with the steel stamp of obedience, ensuring no one could escape his control.
He ordered his slaves to build him an immortal palace in the desert.
Whenever a slave died from overwork, he desecrated the corpse and turned it into a living corpse, so it could continue serving him even after death—even if there was no afterlife.
For a moment, Dawn felt that the only difference between Tang Qi before her and that slave owner...
was the whip in his hand.
"I'll help, too."
Her soul was bound, so she couldn't defy Tang Qi's orders.
And watching the "slaves" dig only made her honor writhe in torment.
So she bent down, ready to dig alongside the kobold.
"No. I'll have a use for you later.
With bones as brittle as yours, what if you broke a hand before we even got underground?"
"Slave owner" Tang Qi refused her with righteous indignation.
"I'm a very humane master. I'm not forcing it—
Kuru, if you don't want to work, you don't have to."
"Kuru like digging!"
The kobold dug with tears in its eyes.
"See? It's so moved it's about to cry."
"..."
Dawn turned her back.
If she couldn't stop this injustice, the best thing she could do was look away.
Tang Qi felt the soul-light on the ring dim and quietly sighed.
He really had