"Help, help me—!"
In the Nether Capital of Shenjing, countless Shenjing people who had been rejoicing that they possessed incense offerings in the Nether Capital cried out and fled in panic. The space-time of the Nether Capital was violently shaken by the aftershocks of An Jing and Yin Gujin's clashing fists.
Though the surging force had not deliberately struck at them, it had indeed destroyed part of Shenjing within the Nether Capital.
The continent that had originally floated upon the endless Bitter Sea of the underworld also collapsed as a result. The stretch of Underworld land caught in the devastation sank violently.
Land formed from incense and faith was overrun by an even stronger faith and turned into nothingness. Many souls, not floating in midair but bound within the city by incense, screamed as they fell into the sea.
Yet just as these countless souls were gripped by terror, some souls unbound by incense—hovering in the air and previously mocked by the others as "outsiders"—discovered something inconceivable.
Beneath the land of the entire Nether Capital Shenjing, apart from the dust of incense, there were roots upon roots, gnarled and intertwined in incomparably intricate tangles.
Those were... the roots of the Zhu Zhao Yao Ming Ying Tian Immortal Tree!
Dark and profound, they plunged straight into the bottom of the Bitter Sea, seemingly without end. Yet strands of golden incense-root qi extended from those roots, winding around the "superior dead souls" who, through sacrificial offerings and worship, had gained homes and settled in the Nether Capital.
These incense-root qi granted those dead souls the right to be "real" within the Underworld. They could eat, drink, and indulge as they had while alive rather than remain illusory bodies. Even after Nether Capital Shenjing collapsed, they would not completely plunge into the Bitter