In the early hours before dawn, Lian Family Town was like an ink-wash painting stained by the night, lying quietly between heaven and earth.
Silvery-white moonlight, like a layer of thin gauze, drifted gently down over every corner of the small city. The old locust tree by the street cast mottled shadows beneath the moonlight, the outlines of its branches and leaves sketched with exceptional clarity. When a light breeze brushed past, the tree shadows swayed, as if whispering something in low voices.
Suddenly, a deafening wolf howl tore through the deathly stillness, its sound waves rolling out as if to overturn everything. The enormous Green Wolf King, like a small mountain, hovered above Lian Family Town, and terrifying waves of spiritual power spread like tides and billows. In an instant, heaven and earth seemed to be stirred by a giant hand, whipping up a wind out of nowhere powerful enough to change the sky and shift the land.
The wind roared like ten thousand horses galloping, like a thousand troops howling, sweeping in with a force that crushed dry weeds and smashed rotten wood. Wherever it passed, thick trees were uprooted, their branches and trunks whirling wildly through the air with chilling cracks as they snapped; tiles from pavilions and houses tumbled and spun through the sky like sheets of paper.
The sudden change jolted awake those still sunk in dreams.
In the depths of the Lian family's old estate, inside an ancient, plain quiet room, an elderly man with a head of white hair and a withered face abruptly opened his eyes.
His sunken eye sockets, protruding cheekbones, and skin like the bark of dead wood all showed that he had already reached the end of his flickering candle.
But the instant the wolf howl startled him awake,