He saw a blood-red meteor streaking across the sky, hurtling toward them at an incredible speed.
The meteor grew larger and brighter, its fiery tail stretching across nearly half the horizon.
"That's—"
Before he could finish, Tang Hao had already descended from the sky.
The Clear Sky Hammer slammed down hard.
"Boom!"
"Boom!"
Roars thundered one after another from deep within the mountains, each rising before the last had faded, like muffled thunder rolling back and forth across the earth.
Holy Soul Village, built against the mountainside, trembled beneath the ceaseless shaking.
In the village square, young and old alike had gathered together, with Old Jack at their head.
Everyone watched the direction from which the roars came in trepidation. The mountains they had known all their lives now seemed like a colossal beast roaring in fury.
"Village chief, those roars have been going on for more than two hours now."
A burly man in a coarse-cloth undershirt, his skin darkened by the sun, walked up beside Old Jack, his voice low.
His weather-beaten face was full of alarm, and his fingers, clenched around a hoe, had gone faintly white.
"Could it... could it be a major earthquake?"
"If only it were an earthquake."
Old Jack sighed, gazing toward the distant mountains with his cloudy eyes. He started to speak, then stopped.
Who would have thought that his remote little mountain village, so obscure it couldn't even be found on a map, would see such a huge number of Soul Masters?
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he had seen more Soul Masters in the past two days than he had in all the rest of his life combined.
He had also caught fragments of conversation here and there.
The hurried Soul Masters kept repeating the same phrase—Hundred Thousand Year Soul Bone.
As the village chief of Holy Soul Village, a place that had once produced a Soul Saint, Old Jack knew what a Hundred Thousand Year Soul Bone meant.
It was a legendary treasure, something even Titled Douluo would fight tooth and nail to seize.
But how could something like that appear in a poor, remote place like theirs? Wouldn't it get the whole village killed?
He had no idea which son of a bitch had hidden such a precious Soul Bone in a place like theirs. Wasn't that just asking for trouble?!
The angrier Old Jack grew, the harder he jabbed his cane against the ground, thump after thump.
But for all his anger, fear filled his heart even more.
When immortals fought, mortals suffered. How long could a little village without even a Soul Grandmaster remain in peace?
May that departed Soul Saint watch over them. Please, don't let Holy Soul Village get caught up in this.
Old Jack prayed silently, his withered lips moving soundlessly.
--
"Drip—"
Scarlet blood slid from the face of the Clear Sky Hammer, drawing a thin line through the air before splashing against the ground and blooming into a tiny blood flower.
The eerie crimson patterns across the hammer's face had darkened until they were nearly black, swollen as if they might bulge right off the metal.
Tang Hao stood before several bodies already smashed into meat patties, gripping the Clear Sky Hammer without a word.
From the valley to this place, he had lost count of how many people he had killed.
Dozens? Hundreds? Perhaps more.
With every swing of the hammer, he turned and lunged at his next target, without pausing or hesitating, without even looking at the faces of those who fell.
His robes had been soaked in blood, then dried by Soul Power, leaving a layer of dark-brown crust that shed flakes of dried blood whenever he moved.
Yet after killing so many Soul Masters, the murderous intent in Tang Hao's heart had not eased in the slightest. Instead, it had reached its peak.
His fury seemed to have been watered with blood; the more it burned, the fiercer it grew, until his very organs seemed to sear with pain.
But beneath that searing pain, his mind had cleared.
He began to think, to consider exactly where things had gone wrong.
For the past twelve years, he had stayed in Holy Soul Village without ever leaving.
For twelve years, all had been calm and uneventful. Not once had anything gone wrong.
But he had barely been gone a few days before word of Ah Yin's Soul Bone spread across the entire continent. Someone had even taken the seed.
It was already obvious where the problem lay.
Tang Hao's body jolted.
His blood-red eyes flew wide, and an extremely dangerous glint flashed through his crimson pupils.
It was the villagers of Holy Soul Village! They had to be the ones who leaked the information!
Tang Hao wheeled around.
The dense blood mist around him, so thick it seemed almost liquid, shuddered and engulfed him. He became a blinding streak of blood-red light, racing straight toward Holy Soul Village at the foot of the mountain.
--
Half an hour passed in the Holy Soul Village square, and at last the roars in the distance gradually died away.
"Village chief, the shaking stopped half an hour ago. Are we safe now?"
A woman holding a toddler edged closer to Old Jack, deliberately lowering her voice so as not to wake the child who had only just fallen asleep in her arms.
Old Jack glanced toward the mountains, finally fallen silent in the distance. The wrinkles on his face relaxed a little.
"Given the situation right now, we should be safe."
Old Jack spoke slowly, tapping his cane lightly against the muddy ground.
"But just to be safe, let's wait another half an hour. If nothing happens, then—"
"Waaah—"
Before Old Jack could finish, the toddler sleeping in the woman's arms suddenly burst into tears without warning.
The shrill, piercing wail shattered the hard-won quiet in the square in an instant.
The woman hurried to soothe the child, but the little one only cried harder, inconsolable no matter what she tried.
The sharp cries echoed through the empty square like a blunt knife cutting into everyone's heart.
The villagers' faces changed. Several elderly people shivered instinctively.
Someone murmured, "An ill omen." A pall of gloom settled over everyone there, and would not lift.
Just then, a streak of blood-red light tore through the night sky.
It shot toward them from the mountains, trailing a crimson tail of flame across the heavens. Its deafening roar sounded like thunder. It came closer and closer, brighter and faster.
In the blink of an eye, the blood-red streak had stopped in midair above the Holy Soul Village square.
An irresistible, overwhelming pressure descended from above, crashing into everyone's hearts like an invisible mountain.
The pressure was so crushing that people could hardly breathe. Several frail elders collapsed to the ground, while the women clutched their children tightly to their chests, too afraid even to cry aloud.
The crooked jujube trees around the square bent in unison beneath the force of the shock wave, their branches and leaves trembling.
The blood-red light slowly faded.
A towering figure appeared before everyone's eyes.
The man hovered in midair, wrapped from head to toe in a thick layer of blood-colored Soul Power. His robes had long since lost their original color and were encrusted with dried blood.
He held an enormous black hammer in his right hand. The densely packed crimson patterns on its face were nearly black and slowly writhed, giving off a nauseating stench of blood.
Wild hair obscured most of his face, leaving only a pair of blood-red eyes visible. There was not a trace of reason in them, only murderous intent, churning like a raging river.
"T-Tang Hao?"