"Main God! You've all recovered? How is Warrior Captain Copilli?"
"Priest Ah Ding, we are people who passed the Main God's trial and were returned by the Main God. These scars are the marks of the trial. And the coughing is the death that has only just gone far away."
Before Priest Ah Ding, Tai Juying spoke so. A dozen Kingdom Warriors and Dog-kin archers who had just recovered stood behind him like that, just as covered in wounds, just as gaunt and weak.
After undergoing this "trial," Tai Juying's face was no longer the smooth, copper-red, taut face it had been before. Smallpox had left dense pits on the skin of his prime, or "pockmarks." The deepest pockmarks were like burns from sparks, scattered over his forehead, cheekbones, and around his temples. Those deep scars gave off a dim sheen in the sunlight, as if a dead lake surface were covered in cracked traces of mud.
The shallower pockmarks lay across his bare shoulders and back. His bronze skin had been clawed at during the illness, showing winding shallow scars one after another. They were the traces of severe scabs; after they fell away, the newly grown skin and the old scars differed in color in staggered patches, like chaotic river channels. Large stretches of shallow scars covered his whole body, representing some terrible death that had once come. And now, Death God had come and gone, leaving not only outward wounds, but also making his voice lighter and more hurried when he spoke. Sometimes he would cough twice halfway through, carrying a faint hoarseness. As for the other warriors and archers, they were much the same!
"Cough! Cough... We walked the road of the trial to its end. Many people went to the Divine Kingdom. And Warrior Captain