Looking toward the sound.
The Thunder Sea churned, lightning crisscrossing as hundreds of millions of thunder-serpents descended from the heavens, casting the entire mine vein into flickering light and shadow.
Tiandi seemed to be raging without cease.
Yet upon the earth—
there was only the mechanical, monotonous roar of striking.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud!
The sounds were muffled and slow, without rhythm or emotion, as though it was not living beings at work, but a group of shells stripped of their souls, repeating some motion they could not stop.
The gale swept up gravel and bone ash.
Rain mixed with thunderfire, scouring the ground into charred ravines.
The cultivators mining there wore tattered robes, their skin scorched and cracked, their bodies covered in burns left by the lightning's backlash. Some had already been reduced to charcoal from the waist down, yet they still swung their mining hammers.
They did not speak.
They did not curse.
They did not even feel pain.
There was only numbness.
As though even the act of "living" had been ground smooth by time.
Another bolt of lightning fell.
Boom!
A cultivator did not even have time to scream before he turned directly into drifting ash.
The person beside him merely shifted slightly and continued digging.
No one stopped.
No one looked back.
As though falling was merely the most ordinary thing here.
The sight made the pupils of several sect disciples shrink slightly, and they could not help drawing in a cold breath.
Deep within the mine vein, the terrain sank even lower.
Countless dry bones lay piled there.
Some still sat cross-legged, as if they had tried to use cultivation to resist the mine vein's backlash, only to fail in the end.
Others gripped their mining tools tightly in both hands, never releasing them