Light and shadow swayed.
Shen Le swayed with them. He had experienced countless similar scenes and understood that he had once again entered the chime bells' memory:
But he had never encountered an environment like this. Dark, oppressive, hard to breathe. When he tried to draw in a breath, his nose and mouth filled with a faint stench—
Not the smell of manure in the fields, not the stink of corpses on a battlefield, not the odor of burning protein, but a rotten, weary smell mixed amid vast quantities of burning incense—
Yet the smell was somewhat familiar, as though he had encountered it somewhere before. Shen Le carefully sniffed once, then again, and suddenly understood:
He had smelled this scent just days ago! In the capital of Bald Eagle Country, in the square outside the White House, beside the Wall Street Bull, in the sewers of Big Apple City—
It was not a physical smell, but one belonging to the spirit—a nation's scent of senescence and decay. Just as people had an old-person smell, a country that had grown old and feeble would give off this scent too—
This was—Chu Kingdom—
His vision gradually cleared. Shen Le narrowed his eyes and looked ahead through the curling blue smoke. Chu orchid used for sacrifices, Lemongrass burned continuously, smoke rising upward, yet it could not suppress that scent of decline:
And in the great hall, everyone wore the ashen complexion of the dead, sticky, rotten odors constantly emanating from their bodies. —
Just left of the center of the hall, below the royal throne, sat a young man in his twenties. His face was pale, dark circles heavy beneath his eyes, and his back nearly hunched over;
On either side of the young man sat two rows of officials. A sea