His gaze passed over the cracked black earth beneath his feet and settled on the far end of the horizon.
There stood a city.
A vast city built from countless enormous beast bones and black mud. Bleached bones jutted through its mud walls like fangs pointing toward the sky, brimming with primal ferocity.
Below the walls, firelight flickered, and countless dark specks knelt.
"Master, the laws here have deteriorated badly, and the spiritual energy is impure and poisonous." Ji Chen's divine sense rang out in Zhou Xuan's Sea of Consciousness. The Heavenly Strategy Compass Fragment on his wrist had dimmed, its divinations clearly meeting considerable resistance. "But these natives seem to have a system of power we don't understand."
Zhou Xuan said nothing.
The moment the two set foot on that black earth, the distant bone city erupted into an uproar.
"Wooo-aaooo!"
A shrill, grating horn sounded. Dozens of bare-chested natives, muscular to an absurd degree, charged out of the city. They carried sharpened bone spears and enormous stone axes, their skin painted with twisted symbols in unknown pigments. Unintelligible roars burst from their mouths, like a pack of enraged beasts.
They quickly spread out and surrounded Zhou Xuan and Ji Chen.
A figure stepped out from among the natives.
It was an old man, so thin he was little more than a bundle of bones. Animal teeth and feathers hung all over him, and thick paint covered his face, leaving only a pair of cloudy eyes glinting with ferocity.
The high priest.
Those eyes fixed on Zhou Xuan and Ji Chen. His shriveled lips moved, and a halting, disjointed thread of divine sense reached them.
"Beyond the heavens... evil demons... ill omen..."
"Sacrifice... appease... divine wrath..."
A flash of Supreme One divine light passed through Ji Chen's eyes, and