A corpse knelt beside the steps, its face twisted into a hideous grimace, one hand clutching its heart.
Blood stained the ground. Thick yin baleful qi mingled with the dark red earth, and dense clouds of mist slowly flowed outward.
In the courtyard outside, the household's corpses lay strewn every which way, likewise wreathed in black and red mist that gathered in the streets.
The sun was already high overhead, yet the streets stood empty. All that remained were black and red streams of yin baleful qi, like clouds of sorrow and mists of misery, and ragged zombies shambling aimlessly.
This was a great city in a mortal kingdom, tucked away in a corner of the Misty Wave Kingdom.
Several days earlier, tens of thousands of bone soldiers had descended from the sky and begun slaughtering indiscriminately. Cultivators then added fuel to the fire throughout the residential districts, massacring over half the city in an astonishingly short time.
All manner of baleful qi, sonic waves, poisonous miasma, and even soul-seizing vengeful spirits and ghostly apparitions were scarcely worth mentioning in the cultivation world, but unleashed upon ordinary mortals, they inflicted horrific casualties.
Some powerful, wealthy households banded together and held off small groups of bone soldiers and zombies, but they could not withstand the invisible, traceless plague.
Those blessed with good fortune, or with ancestral legacies that had left them an Immortal Treasure or some other means of preserving their lives, managed to remain safe for the time being.
Yet every necessity of mortal life depended upon society. At a time like this, the frailty of an individual mortal's ability to survive was laid bare.
More than half still met terrible deaths.
The mortal authorities, princes, ministers, and generals had no solution at all. They could only order the city