But at that very instant...
The vibrations at the tower's base suddenly vanished.
The low hum that had persisted for so long cut off without warning. Rubble no longer fell from the edges of the fissure midway up the tower, and the stone slabs on the platform stopped trembling. Zhao Feng stood at the fissure's edge. Once the vibrations stopped, the stone beneath his feet took on an unnatural stillness, like the brief calm on the sea before a storm.
The grayish-white mist hanging in the sky rapidly gathered toward the fissure at a speed visible to the naked eye. Its edges grew denser as it moved, forming a continuous downward stream at the opening.
The dark wheel of light at the bottom of the fissure stopped spinning once the mist had fully gathered. The grayish-white light at its center suddenly flared, then surged outward from the middle like an old door being pushed open from within, spilling out everything that had accumulated behind it over the years.
That light rose from the bottom of the fissure and stopped roughly thirty feet above the tower's summit.
By now, everyone had stopped fighting and turned to look toward the top of the tower.
As the light gradually faded...
A figure hovered in midair. He looked utterly different from every Martial Dao expert Zhao Feng had ever seen. He was taller than an ordinary person, but his skin was a grayish white, as though it had been soaked and dried countless times. His face was unusually long and narrow, his cheekbones jutting high on either side. His eyes were so deeply sunken that their eyeballs were almost invisible, yet two steady clusters of grayish-white light slowly revolved where his pupils should have been. His hair was grayish white as well, falling nearly