Beyond the snow mountain, the entire world was melting.
Men, women, old, and young were all sucked into the sacrificial pit. Screams and wails rose beneath the dome, while dissolving flesh left behind crystalline skeletons.
Birds and beasts occupied the land abandoned by humanity, raising their heads in proclamation-like howls before gathering at the snow mountain from every corner of the world.
Birds crashed to the ground, schools of fish stranded themselves on rocky shores, and every animal prostrated itself at the foot of the mountain, devoutly worshipping the source of its life.
Immortal Shangri-La—here lay the god who had created them. Adorn this long dream that belonged to the god; end your miserable fates amid happiness and joy...
Just as an injured child instinctively sought its mother's embrace, and a wanderer caught in Wind and Rain in a foreign land always dreamed of returning home, now all humans and animals would hasten toward their most primordial mother, their eternal homeland.
At an altitude of eight thousand meters, the snow mountain could already touch the horizon. As the highest point of this land, ignorant herdsmen had endowed it with legends of communicating with the gods, while scientists had labeled it the result of tectonic compression.
In the past, it had been a deadly place rarely visited by anyone, proof of the brave challenging nature. Now, it had become the center of the world, the key to restarting time and space, the Altar connected to the supreme Rules.
The summit was the place closest to the gods—or perhaps it was a god itself. That god had once selflessly granted life to countless beings, and now would mercilessly take it all back.
The fate of one person, the fates of billions; the life and death of one thing, the life and death