"Stay alive!" Lin Qi muttered with difficulty.
"What else can I do but stay alive?" The woman stared blankly at Lin Qi. "Dying would be easy for me—very easy. But Little Julie... I can't take her with me when I die. I can't abandon her, but neither can I take her with me. Other than staying alive, what else can I do?"
Lin Qi bent down and gently stroked the woman's filthy, tangled hair. In a low voice, he said, "You can also watch how this Chaos City disappears! I swear, you will see how this damned Chaos City vanishes. Those who created all this, and those who turned a blind eye to it—I will make every last one of them pay the price!"
"Are you... a god?" A brilliant glimmer shone in the woman's vacant eyes. "People from the temples came and told us that if we believed in the gods, we could be saved. But after all this time, I still haven't seen anyone rescued! Can we... really be saved?"
Lin Qi was silent for a long while, recalling some of the things the Osmanthus Tree had told him.
"Believe in yourself. Don't believe in gods!" Lin Qi broke into a dazzling smile. "I'm not a god. I... am merely a human!"
Straightening up, Lin Qi looked over the boundless sprawl of tattered tents around him and said gently, "But humans can also make this Chaos City perish completely. We don't need the help of those gods to do it!"
Gods? Lin Qi cast a mocking glance north, then south. A god was stationed in each direction—one a god descended through possession, the other a god reborn through reincarnation. Yet they simply sat outside the city, utterly indifferent to whether the people inside lived or died.
Holding the