"I don't want to die. I can't die yet..."
"Grandpa, what's wrong? Wake up, sob sob sob..."
"O gods, please have mercy on us!"
As corpse after corpse piled up, the voices of men, women, young, and old blended into a surging tide that roared past his ears.
The dead's pasts—ordinary and weary, hateful and sorrowful, ambitious and smug with success... A thousand people, a thousand faces. Countless fates streamed before his eyes, colliding and exploding into dazzling fireworks.
Conflicting, fervent, chaotic emotions churned violently at the bottom of his mind. Murmurs, thoughts, obsessions, desires—mud of every color seemed to smear itself across Qi Si's soul through time and space, gradually changing from vivid hues into a muddled mess.
Qi Si remained seated steadily beside the pit, utterly unmoving. The weight pressing upon his soul transformed into a sluggish exhaustion, weighing him down, dragging him under, then merging him into the muddy current...
"They can't see you." In the Beast Arena Instance, the other him within the dream had told him, "You have no desires. A person without desires cannot remain in this world for long."
"Then why can they see me now?" Qi Si asked with a smile at the figure in a red robe embroidered with gold that appeared before him. Only after coming back to himself did he realize he was hallucinating. There was no one else beside the sacrificial pit.
Yet the figure in his hallucination calmly told him, "To bear the desires of all living beings is the duty the Ancestral God must shoulder. Do you wish to become the Ancestral God? You must understand: a god's desires are what all living beings seek. No self, only living beings..."
The person before him could not be the pact. Not only because the pact had already