In the dead of night, amid a heap of shattered rubble, there came a soft rustle. A cultivator drenched in blood, his face unrecognizable, struggled to crawl out.
Pfft!
But just as the cultivator had dragged half his body free, a black shadow suddenly leaped down from above. Two blade-like forelimbs pierced through the body of the cultivator, who had already been at death's door.
The cultivator's body twitched slightly, then went still.
Immediately afterward, a multitude of rustling sounds arose. Many black shadows descended, and in only a few moments, all that remained of the cultivator were a few fragments of bone.
Beyond the pile of rubble where the cultivator had been was an even broader expanse of city ruins.
The entire city, built against the mountainside, was shrouded in an eerie mist thick with the stench of blood.
Not a single intact building could be seen in the whole city, nor was there any trace of cultivators. Everywhere lay broken pieces of houses and halls, scraps of cultivators' robes, and the mutilated corpses of all manner of demonic beasts.
This city was Lingyue City, at the southernmost edge of Tianxuan Continent, where Wei Suo had spent many years.
In a stretch of wasteland, several hundred cultivators were fleeing madly. Far behind them stood a great city engulfed in flames that reached the heavens.
A streak of yellow cloud relentlessly pursued the several hundred cultivators. Flashes of light occasionally shot from their ranks into the yellow cloud behind them, but it slowly caught up all the same. Cultivators constantly fell from the sky with screams, only to be devoured by countless yellow, locust-like demonic beasts shooting out from within the cloud.
The several hundred cultivators grew fewer and fewer until, in the end, they vanished entirely into the yellow