"Forward."
The eighth character burst apart, becoming a straight, ink-black avenue that stretched from beneath Xie Approaching the Abyss's feet to beneath Lang Tu's.
Countless ink-black phantoms of ancient sages appeared along the avenue, standing on either side of the road and gazing calmly at Lang Tu.
An immensely heavy aura of righteousness filled the avenue, pressing down on Lang Tu with the weight of an entire scholarly tradition.
The instant the avenue of the Forward character took shape, Lang Tu's knees buckled violently, and his five-foot wolf body was crushed to its knees beneath that weight.
He gritted his teeth and tried to push himself up, but his knees had barely risen half an inch before they were forced back down.
Dark red blood seeped from his gums between his two rows of sharp teeth.
The All-Character Network and the bands of light from the Array character had scored his back with a dense web of bloody welts.
"The Forward character governs advancing."
Xie Approaching the Abyss's right hand had already begun to turn transparent as he wrote the Forward character, his fingertips dissolving into tiny specks of ink-black light that drifted through the air.
"Those walking this road are the predecessors of the Human Race through the ages."
"They are watching you."
"You kneel before them. Until they speak, you cannot rise."
Lang Tu knelt on the ink-black avenue, without a single patch of intact fur left on his body.
The bloody light in his dark green slit pupils had gone out completely, leaving only a murky dark green, the light deep within his pupils like the last flicker of a candle in the wind.
He raised his head and looked at the final ink-black sphere of light hovering at Xie Approaching the Abyss's fingertip. Sealed within it