Eternal Frozen Sorrow was a form of mental and spiritual shock.
Zong Shen stood at the edge of that grand yet shattered plaza.
His gaze swept over the figures eternally frozen within the ice of emotion.
The low sobbing behind him had gradually faded.
Yet the sight before him, frozen at the very instant of the empire's destruction, delivered another kind of silent impact.
The Eternal Sleep Flute in his hand continued to emit a warm dark-red glow.
It faintly resonated with some lingering fluctuation from the ruined altar deep within the plaza.
"The second layer of the Mourning Ice Court. Things should start getting serious if I keep going."
Zong Shen knew that everything before this had merely been an appetizer.
The real main course was probably waiting for him ahead.
He stepped onto the plaza floor paved with dark-red eternally frozen bloodstone.
The instant his foot came down.
The emotional ice covering the ground did not crack. Instead, it glimmered faintly.
The lifelike faces beneath the ice seemed to turn toward him all at once.
Though Zong Shen knew these faces were merely phantoms sealed in ancient ice, he still felt as though he were truly there.
At that moment, a spiritual pressure far purer and heavier than anything in the corridor descended silently.
It was not a direct attack, but an omnipresent witnessing.
Every frozen figure had imprinted their final emotions upon the laws of this plaza—despair and grief, hatred for the invaders, reluctance to leave their homeland, confusion over the collapse of their faith in Winter, and more.
Any living being who entered this place would be forced to experience some fragment of that catastrophe.
After Zong Shen had taken only three steps, the image of an old man in priestly robes, standing with both hands