"Shen Lu, keep an eye on things!"
Shen Tang held a bloodied, mangled head in her hand.
Most of the head was crushed and caved in, and its burst eyeballs dangled outside their sockets. It was a gruesome sight. If that maid had been here, she might have recognized a few familiar features after a closer look. Wasn't the owner of this head the envoy?
As soon as she spoke, a long, clear whale song rang out across the sky.
In the blink of an eye, the phantom of a gigantic humpback whale appeared in the sky. It quickly shifted from transparent to solid, its flippers gliding gracefully through the waves as it blocked more of the boulders about to crash down. The maid stared, dumbstruck, then collapsed in the ruins, unable to move. She didn't stir until she heard a scream from the crush of refugees: "My child—!"
"Please, save my child—!"
"Stop pushing!"
The woman's shrill voice was quickly swallowed by the surrounding din.
The maid endured her discomfort and glanced toward the sound.
One look was enough to make her limbs go weak.
A woman was being carried forward by the surging crowd, desperately reaching for the child not far away. The child was still young, barely a teenager. Amid the chaos and fighting, he neither cried nor made a fuss. He didn't even respond to the woman.
He couldn't respond.
His whole face had been crushed purple, blood ran from all seven orifices, and the hand he had stretched out was raised high at a grotesque angle. His corpse drifted along with the slowly surging crowd, rising and sinking among them. Then another explosion went off, and the crowd surged in panic once more. The boy sank beneath them for good, trampled into a pulp by