Weapons are instruments of ill omen; war is a perilous undertaking. The battlefield is a place where corpses lie.
-Anonymous
As she had so often before, Qiong Rong had slipped away to fight at her brother's side. When he intercepted her halfway there, she thought he had come back expressly to catch her. Once she recovered from her surprise, however, the innocent little girl sensed that something was wrong. Living with him day and night, she knew her hall master brother well: he had walked through life and death countless times with scarcely a change of expression. Yet now his face was unnaturally pale, his expression despondent, his breathing ragged. His helmet sat crooked and his armor hung askew; he was a complete mess.
"Something has happened at Ghost Spirit Abyss! Come back with me and report it!"
At that moment, even upon encountering Qiong Rong, Xing Yan said only those few words. He wrapped an arm around the little girl who had happened into his embrace and urged the Frostwind Divine Horse beneath him northward toward the Four Rivers Camp. Behind him, the demon soldiers and divine generals also fled north in a half-cloud, half-mist rout, like a gale sweeping away the last shreds of cloud.
A mere few hundred li passed in an instant. But just as they came within a few strides of the Four Rivers Encampment, the winds and clouds between heaven and earth abruptly changed!
Since he had first learned to understand the world, he had witnessed many changes in the skies and strange manifestations of heaven and earth. In truth, though, those had only been disturbances within ten or a hundred li of wherever he stood. When the eye could see no farther, people called it heaven and earth transformed, the universe turned upside