Crack—
Shen Tang watched as the battle was about to erupt, but a sound like something splitting apart reached her ears. She knew this bizarre dream was about to end. She turned to leave, but a fierce, piercing pain tore through her chest. Her steps halted, and she looked back one last time.
The entire world fell into some kind of distortion.
Only the reincarnation of the god, pierced through the heart, remained clear.
A voice, neither male nor female, rang out of the void. Even Shen Tang, who had no physical form, felt a faint sense of suffocation. The stabbing pain in her heart grew stronger. "Do you know what happens to those who defy the gods?"
The young man answered calmly, "I don't know, but I'm willing to risk it!"
The voice gave no further reply, but an unfamiliar answer quietly surfaced in Shen Tang's heart: "Born at dawn, dead by dusk, life after life."
A pitch-black bolt of heavenly lightning, stretching from heaven to earth, crashed down. The young man and the battling figures were swallowed up in its entirety.
For an instant, Shen Tang's ears rang, too.
She abruptly opened her eyes and sat bolt upright.
The bedchamber was utterly silent. Blurred moonlight seeped in through the windows, faintly revealing the hour. Shen Tang panted as her gaze slowly came into focus. She looked down at the silk quilt piled over her waist. Having just emerged from a long dream, everything around her seemed strangely unfamiliar.
She raised a hand to her cold, damp forehead and felt the sticky sweat.
Had she really sweated that much?
Was the bedchamber's heating turned up too high?
Shen Tang closed her eyes and exhaled. "What time is it?"
Two voices, one male and one female, answered from above the