The star was small, its surface dull gray and covered in mined-out pits.
Looking down from high above, they could see a few scattered, crude cities, their lights sparse. It looked even more desolate than the Lower Three Heavens of Purple Firmament Heaven.
The three descended through the air.
The closer they drew to the ground, the more noticeable a faint, bloody smell became.
Luo Hongyi wrinkled her nose. Gray Gray also grew uneasy and edged closer to Si Chen.
"Fellow Daoist Si Chen, this smell..." Luo Hongyi said quietly.
"Blood."
Si Chen's gaze was calm. Following the mark in his Sea of Consciousness, he adjusted their course. "Over there."
They flew low over the ground.
At first, the sights were fairly normal.
Abandoned mines, crude shacks, and the occasional ragged miner hiding in the shadows, watching in terror as they flew past.
But as they drew closer to the mark, the colors on the ground began to change.
First came scattered dark red spots.
Then trails of blood.
Farther ahead, bodies appeared.
The first lay in a roadside ditch, dressed as an overseer, with a gaping hole in his chest.
The second hung from a collapsed scaffold, his neck bent at a strange angle. The third, the fourth...
There were more and more bodies.
From scattered corpses to bodies everywhere, from overseers to ordinary miners, then cultivators in matching clothes.
Blood flowed across the ground, gathering into dark red streams and seeping into the soil.
The bloody stench hung thick in the air.
Luo Hongyi's face grew a little pale.
"Was this... a citywide massacre?"
It was not as though she had never seen slaughter, but this...
Gray Gray went so far as to bury its head in the fabric at Si Chen's back, daring only to peek out