Dingjun!

[You were only walking, moving forward step by step, each step landing extremely lightly and steadily.]

[The tunnel was very long.]

[You walked for two whole days.]

[During those two days, you passed countless forks in the road.]

[Some led to deeper reaches of the void, while others led to completely unknown layers of spacetime.]

[Relying on the perception of the Human Emperor Token, you kept advancing along the main road that led to the central region.]

[The closer you came to the core area, the denser the spatial cracks on the tunnel walls became.]

[The spiritual light shining through them also grew stronger.]

[Some of the spiritual light even carried warmth, shining on your face like a warm breeze.]

[You realized that these spiritual lights were not merely residual scraps of energy.]

[They were fragments of memory from the great war ten thousand years ago.]

[When you passed through a particularly wide section of tunnel, your steps stopped.]

[There was a huge rupture in the tunnel wall, and the spiritual light shining out from within it was more intense than anywhere else.]

[You could not help taking a step closer.]

[Then you saw it.]

[A scene was reflected within the spiritual light.]

[A Human Emperor Flagship was burning in the void, its hull bristling with strange black war spears.]

[On the bridge, a Human Race general clad in battle armor stood before a shattered spiritual-light screen.]

[Most of his battle armor had already been broken, and his left arm had been severed cleanly at the elbow.]

[Blood trickled down along the broken armor plates and dripped onto the bridge.]

[But his spine was ramrod straight.]

[Before him were thousands upon thousands of weird cultivators, a black mass that blotted out the sky and covered the earth.]

[That general laughed.]