Hope

The Dean looked at Great Hua's Human Emperor and sighed, his expression filled with profound desolation.

"Good child, you've suffered..."

The Human Emperor looked at the Dean and shook his head slightly, choking out, "I haven't suffered. It's the people of the world who have suffered."

The Dean sighed and raised his head to gaze at the heavens. "I know..."

The Human Emperor stared blankly at the Dean. He, too, saw profound anguish in the Dean's eyes.

"What are you waiting for, Dean? Why didn't you act sooner..." the Human Emperor asked.

Yet he also knew that the Dean's cultivation was no higher than that of those who had come. But... the Dean was their only hope.

The Dean shook his head and slowly sat down on the palace threshold. Great Hua's Human Emperor sat beside him.

"The time has not yet come..."

The Dean gazed toward the horizon, sorrow flickering in his eyes, as though something above the firmament were meeting his gaze.

"A great calamity is coming. When that time comes... how could the people's plight be called mere suffering... only this way can we buy ourselves some time."

The light screen of the Nation-Guarding Grand Array encircling Great Hua's borders boomed again and again under the Thunder Spirit's strikes, its sounds like cries of grief...

Even bolstered by the National Fortune Power of the entire Ninth Realm, without a Human Emperor capable of wielding it fully, it could not hold out for long.

The light screen surrounding all of Great Hua stood like a barrier across the world, protecting the last land of human rule in this world.

The booming rang incessantly in their ears. Everyone in the nation watched the horizon, watching the light screen shudder and waver under the blows.

Two figures waited quietly before