The First Spark of Mortal Awakening!

The rain poured down in torrents.

The muddy alleys of Black Mud City's outer district had been completely submerged in a murky sea of mudwater.

The severed limbs left behind by the day's unrest had been washed pale and swollen by the rain. Dark-red bloody water streamed through the uneven cracks between the bricks, all of it flowing into the reeking ditches on either side of the muddy alley, mingling with slop as it trickled out of the city.

Apart from the dull thuds of raindrops smashing viciously against the ground, the alley was filled with suppressed sobbing pushed to its very limit.

Those mortals huddled beneath the eaves of leaking thatched huts, not even daring to wail aloud.

A squad of Immortal City guards clad in heavy black-iron armor strode through the pooled water and into the muddy alley.

Their heavy armor plates scraped against one another with every step, producing a grating metallic clatter.

The guard at the front showed no courtesy whatsoever.

He raised his iron-plated war boot and viciously kicked a dilapidated wooden door by the roadside that was already on the verge of collapse.

The door crashed down, splinters flying everywhere.

The guard stepped over the threshold and drew the standard-issue saber from his waist with a backhand motion.

He did not use its sharp edge at all. Instead, he swung the broad, heavy flat of the blade straight at the gaunt mortal approaching him from inside, smashing it brutally into his spine.

The crisp crack of breaking bones rang out.

The mortal did not even have time to beg before he screamed and collapsed into the muddy ground, rolling twice.

The guard stepped forward, planted a foot on his head, and ground it hard into the mudwater.

"Pay up."

"Tomorrow is the Offering-to-Immortals Festival. Hand over every last bit of your tax tribute now."

"Short me even one copper coin, and I'll chop you into eight pieces right now and throw you outside the city to feed the wild dogs."

The mortal wept bitterly, half his face pressed into the sludge as he desperately struggled to raise one hand.

"Milord! Have mercy, milord!"

"My wife has been sick for half a month. We truly don't have a single coin left..."

The guard gave a cold snort, and the force beneath his boot suddenly increased.

"Quit trying to fool me with that nonsense."

Another guard charged straight into the inner room, followed by a burst of smashing and overturning.

A moment later, that guard came out carrying several shriveled coarse-grain flatbreads and a few blackened fragments of Mortal Silver.

"Chief, this is all we found."

The guard standing on the mortal's head snatched the Mortal Silver away, weighed it in his hand, and curled his lip in disgust.

"Worthless trash."

He kicked the mortal on the ground flying, then turned toward the next house.

All along the muddy alley, the sounds of doors being kicked in and homes being smashed rose one after another into a single din.

In the foul ditch at the end of the muddy alley,

a fat body was soaking helplessly in blackened slop.

It was Steward Zhao, whose legs had been broken beneath someone's foot during the day.

His once-bright and splendid clothes had been torn into strips, covered in green moss and filthy mud.

That terrifying kick from earlier had ground his kneecaps directly into powder.

Now, the broken bones jutted white through his flesh. After soaking in the filthy water for so long, the wounds had already festered; the flesh around them curled outward, giving off a vile stench.

The guards swaggered past him.

Some even deliberately took long strides, kicking up rotten mud from the ditch with their boots and splashing it directly across Steward Zhao's face.

These lowly guards, who ordinarily had to bow and scrape before him with smiles plastered across their faces, did not spare him even a second glance now.

In this city ruled by the Immortal sects, only one thing mattered: usefulness.

A cripple with broken legs and no status was not even worth as much as a stray dog barking wildly by the roadside.

Pain made Steward Zhao's entire body convulse, his teeth grinding with a creak.

He struggled to turn over in the foul ditch and happened to see the guard commander approaching along the main street.

A fierce light suddenly burst from his shriveled eyes.

He frantically waved his fat hands, caked in stinking mud, his nails packed with black filth.

"Commander!"

"Commander Zhang! Save me! Take me back to the inner city!"

He shouted himself hoarse, his voice utterly ragged and thick with tears.

"I buried two low-grade spirit stones beneath the City Lord's Manor! They're all yours!"

"Just pull me out of this mud pit!"

The guard commander stopped.

He turned his head and looked down at the writhing lump of fat in the foul ditch.

A sound of intense disgust scraped out of his throat.

"Pah."

A glob of thick yellow phlegm shot from the commander's mouth, landing squarely on Steward Zhao's face and running down the bridge of his nose.

The commander's face was full of contempt.

"What the hell are you?"

"The breach in the inner city needs bodies to fill it. The City Lord has just flown into a rage, and he's worrying over where to find scapegoats."

"You crippled mutt can stay in the outer city and wait to feed the beasts drawn here by the scent of blood."

The commander started walking again, striding away through the puddles.

Steward Zhao wiped the thick phlegm and mudwater from his face.

A despairing howl erupted into the rainy night. Its shrill cry echoed back and forth above the muddy alley, yet not a single person paid him any heed.

Behind the half-collapsed courtyard wall next door,

Old Zhang crouched tightly in the corner.

He held his seven-year-old grandson firmly in his arms.

The sounds of doors being kicked in, screams, Steward Zhao's wailing, and the piercing rain all poured into the ruined courtyard from outside.

His grandson trembled all over in terror.

Tears and snot smeared his face. His little mouth opened, on the verge of crying out.

Old Zhang's large, callused hand shot out and clamped over his grandson's mouth.

He covered it tightly.

So tightly that the child could barely breathe.

Don't make a sound.

Whatever happens, don't make a sound.

Old Zhang's eyes bulged from extreme tension, veins throbbing one after another across his forehead.

His breath caught in his throat as he forcibly held it back.

In these times, even the faintest sound of a mortal crying could bring a fatal disaster.

The guard commander's war boots crushed the broken tiles outside the courtyard gate.

Standing in the rain, the commander did not hurry into the courtyard.

His voice, wrapped in the true qi from his dantian, pierced directly through the curtain of rain and spread to every corner of the muddy alley.

"By order of the City Lord!"

"Today, demonic cultivators caused a beastly upheaval and destroyed the inner city wall!"

"All outer-city mortals will pay triple tax tribute tomorrow!"

"Those who cannot pay will use the lives of their entire families, young and old, to fill the formation foundation!"

The instant those words fell,

the sobbing in the alley turned at once into despairing keens.

Some people slammed their heads repeatedly against the mud walls. Others went limp and fainted on the spot.

Triple?

Even a single share of tribute had already forced them to sell their sons and daughters.

Now, this was going to cut off everyone's path to survival entirely.

The commander strode into Old Zhang's half-collapsed courtyard.

He weighed several money pouches he had just looted from other homes in his hand, copper coins clattering inside.

He walked over to the corner.

"Old bastard, hand over the money."

If this had been yesterday, or any time in the past several decades,

Old Zhang's legs would have gone weak, and he would have collapsed directly into the mudwater.

He would have knocked his forehead bloody while weeping and begging the immortal master for a few more days' grace.

But today,

Old Zhang sat amid that heap of rotten mud.

His back rested against the broken earthen wall.

He did not kneel.

Those clouded eyes stared straight at the fully armored commander before him.

His legs did not bend.

Even his waist did not hunch over by habit as it usually did.

He simply sat there quietly, holding his grandson in both arms as rain washed over his wrinkled old face.

The commander paused in surprise.

He clearly had not expected some mud-legged peasant from the outer city to dare look him directly in the eye.

But he had looted enough riches tonight, and he could not even be bothered to waste words cursing.

The commander snorted coldly and kicked over the chipped clay jar beside him.

The jar shattered into several pieces.

"Hand over the money. Don't make me do this the hard way."

Old Zhang said nothing.

His hands trembling, he took out every fragment of Mortal Silver he had long prepared from his ragged cloth pouch.

The commander snatched up the Mortal Silver, dropped it into his money pouch, and weighed it.

"At least these old bones of yours know what's good for them."

"You still owe two more shares tomorrow."

"If you can't scrape it together, I'll personally throw your grandson into the furnace."

After spitting out a few curses, the commander turned and stepped out through the courtyard gate toward the next house.

Once his footsteps had faded completely away,

the muscles in Old Zhang's body instantly loosened.

He removed his hand from his grandson's mouth.

Then his whole body crumpled into the mudwater as he gulped down breath after breath.

His chest heaved violently.

All he breathed in was cold rain and the fishy stench of wet earth.

He had lived for more than sixty years.

Never before had there been a moment when the Immortal City guards standing before him seemed not so terrifying.

Old Zhang's trembling hand slipped into the deepest part of his soaked clothing.

With the utmost care, he drew something out.

It was an object wrapped in three layers of ragged cloth.

His movements were extremely gentle, as though afraid of damaging what lay inside.

He unwrapped the cloth layer by layer.

A fist-sized fragment of pitch-black stone lay silently in his palm.

A patch of dried dark-red blood still stained it.

During the day, when the youth named Lu Chen had forcibly pulled up that thirty-thousand-jin City-Guarding Stele,

the foundation stone beneath it had cracked apart.

This was a fragment that had fallen from the very bottom of the stele.

After that enormous stele had been dragged away during the day,

all the mortals within several hundred zhang had been so terrified that they lay prostrate on the ground, not even daring to lift their heads.

Only Old Zhang

had crawled through the torrential rain on all fours.

Along the muddy main street, he had crawled on his knees all the way to the deep pit where the stele had been forcibly torn out.

The pit was filled with backflowing water and shattered bricks.

Old Zhang had frantically dug through the mudwater.

All ten of his fingernails had peeled back, blood mixing into the sludge, yet he had not noticed at all.

Ignoring everything else, he desperately searched through the ruins at the very bottom.

Finally,

from the deepest mud, he had picked out this fragment of stele stained with Lu Chen's supreme blood vitality.

At this very moment,

his rough, hardened fingers gently rubbed the wild stone veins across its surface.

The numbness and fear that had been rooted deep in Old Zhang's bones were no longer in his eyes.

Those immortal masters who usually sat high in the inner city, casually raining down heavenly punishment.

The formation-walls they used to fend off demon beasts had been smashed down by a mortal.

The City-Guarding Stele they had used to oppress mortals for a hundred years had been pulled away by a bare-chested mortal.

So these things could be destroyed too.

The old man lowered his head.

He looked at his grandson, who was still sobbing in his arms.

He forcefully stuffed that bloodstained black shard of stone into his grandson's tiny, mud-caked hand.

His two callused hands wrapped tightly around the child's tender little one.

He held on with all his strength.

The old man lowered his head, pressing his face close to his grandson's ear.

His voice was lowered to a whisper.

Yet it carried a strength it had never possessed before.

"Grandson."

"Remember this well."

"Immortals' bones can be smashed too."