The setting sun was blood-red, staining the clouds on the horizon with a bleak, haunting beauty.
Just as Black Miasma True Lord cut off the transmission and True Lord Wuhun steeled his resolve and gave the order to attack-
Over a hundred thousand li away, on the frontier of Yuxi Prefecture, lay a nameless town under Blackstone City's jurisdiction.
"Ox, oh ox, for whom do you toil? Spring plowing done, you toil for autumn grain~~!"
A childish herding song drifted between the field ridges, yet failed to dispel the oppression in the air.
The town's earthen walls were mottled, and a few formation flags hung limply, their spiritual energy fluctuations weak.
In the freshly turned spirit fields outside town, dozens of second-class Martial Practitioners with vigorous qi and blood led hundreds of servants, shouting with effort as they drove over a hundred Scaled Armor Oxen to gather up the talisman plows. The oxen were as burly as small elephants, their snorts carrying the rank odor peculiar to demon beasts.
This was a microcosm of the lowest stratum of Great Jin.
Blackstone County's seat governed a territory forty to fifty thousand li across, with a population exceeding a hundred million, and this town was merely one of its thousand-plus unremarkable towns.
Mortals, Martial Practitioners attempting body tempering, rogue cultivators, and small lineages struggled to survive here. They might never in their lives have the chance to witness a Golden Core True Person's arrival, much less know what a Nascent Soul True Lord was, yet their lives and deaths, fortunes and calamities, were constantly toyed with at the whim of the great figures above the clouds.
Like ants.
Inside the town's only Wangyou Residence tavern, by the entrance to town, several Qi Refining rogue cultivators who had just paid their spirit field