A gray-white nether wind swept through the valley, stirring fine, icy soul sand that pattered onto the bones strewn across the ground with barely audible rustles.
The entire Undead Realm had been deathly silent since time immemorial. There was no passage of seasons, no alternation of heat and cold, only endless chill and extinction seeping into every inch of soil and every wisp of air. This nameless nether valley, hidden in the central Undead Realm, embodied that desolation to its utmost.
Shiheng stepped forward, his white robes fluttering as he slowly entered the secluded valley.
Compared with the chaotic, vicious wilderness outside, this place was exceptionally peaceful. There were no raging currents of Nether Qi, no piercing screams of lesser undead fighting one another, and none of the soul bodies being annihilated everywhere else.
The cliffs on all sides were black and massive. Eroded by Nether Qi for hundreds of millions of years, they bore mottled marks of age. Between their striations, faint gray tracery of the Dao of reincarnation intertwined and slowly flowed.
These were fundamental patterns born of nature, silently proclaiming this secluded valley's desolate destiny: isolated from the world, a realm unto itself.
The instant he entered, two frail soul silhouettes drifting in midair came clearly into Shiheng's sight, with nothing obscuring them.
They were his parents, who had died and fallen into the nether realm.
An exceedingly faint pearly spiritual glow surrounded their souls. Their forms were translucent and insubstantial, as though they might dissolve in the wind at any moment. They rose and fell gently with the lingering nether wind, drifting slowly like rootless duckweed and untethered scraps of fluff, wandering, turning, and floating aimlessly through this ancient land of the dead.
After seven days of stripping away, his parents' remnant souls had already lost