An old man squatted in the abyss, so thin he looked like a dried corpse, yet his mouth never closed.
He stuffed everything he could reach into his mouth—dirt, rocks, tree roots, underground waterways. Even the abyss beneath him was gnawed deeper and wider with every bite.
A colossal beast floated among the clouds, with no fixed shape, like an enormous lump of translucent chewing gum. It treated the entire sky as its plate, wrapping clouds, birds, and even the occasional passing angel into its body, slowly digesting them bit by bit.
These so-called gods carried an aura similar to the local nature gods, but they had not been born naturally. They had been fed into existence by the city dwellers.
The residents offered them the finest food, the strongest prey, and even their own kind, letting them feed and grow larger, stronger.
And what those gods gave the residents in return was protection.
They kept foreign enemies coveting this fertile land at bay, made natural disasters and calamities pass them by, and allowed the residents to enjoy peace generation after generation.
The price was that when hunger came, the residents themselves would be eaten.
It was not punishment. It was hunger instinct. Those gods simply could not control themselves.
When they were hungry, they ate anything. It did not matter whether you were a believer or a heretic, whether you had once been the most devout priest or the grand elder who had just offered a sacrifice.
As long as they were hungry, they had to eat.
The residents knew this, but they did not care. They had lived alongside this hunger for countless millennia and had long accepted it as part of the natural order.
Wu Heng stood at the edge of the world, watching those primordial gods