Jiannan Circuit.
Yizhou Prefecture.
Above the vault of heaven, the sun was nowhere to be seen.
Only a heavy blood-red haze pressed down upon the city walls.
Though it was clearly midday, not even the faintest sound of crowing roosters or barking dogs could be heard within this vast city.
The streets were broad, and the banners outside the shops on either side still remained.
Yet they hung limply in the chilling wind, covered in dark brown stains.
The long streets once paved with bluestone were now filled with blood-soaked mud.
Pits and hollows held pools of black blood, with oily slicks floating atop them.
Yet the people walking along these streets seemed to have lost their sense of smell.
Their clothes were ragged, their bodies withered like dead wood.
Their eye sockets were deeply sunken; there was neither terror nor sorrow on their faces.
They were like a crowd of walking corpses whose souls had been ripped away.
An old man, barefoot, stepped into ankle-deep bloody mud.
A crisp crack sounded beneath his sole.
Perhaps he had crushed half a finger bone, or perhaps an eyeball.
Yet the old man remained unmoved. Dragging up strings of sticky gore, he continued shuffling forward, one foot deep and one foot shallow.
Beside him.
A woman tightly held a swaddling bundle with only half a body left inside, staring blankly ahead.
Some people walked along, only for their bodies to tilt before they collapsed into the filth.
Never to move again.
The people around them did not stop either. They could not even be bothered to spare them a glance.
They merely went around the fresh corpse, or stepped directly over it.
In this prosperous stronghold once hailed as the Land of Abundance, nothing remained now but such soundless despair.
Ever since