The change came silently, like an invisible chain winding around their foreheads, chests, and limbs, coil after coil, tightening.
It was also like signing some contract that had existed since before the birth of human writing, each mark branded into place.
Were they marks?
A contract?
Or some strange rule that they, at their current stage, could not understand at all?
No one knew.
Nor could anyone see any of it.
The Steam Train raced silently onward, passing through mountains and rock, leaving that Ghost Domain world strewn with white bones far behind.
Inside the carriage, there was only the rise and fall of heavy breathing and the monotonous rhythm of the wheels.
And in the Ghost Domain they had left behind, the phantom of the Thousand-Hammer, Hundred-Refinement Furnace had vanished without a trace at some unknown point.
The giant skeletal fist that had been deflected rested quietly on the shattered ground, its five mountain-sized knuckles slightly curled, as though grasping something invisible.
In the darkness, something seemed to be watching the direction in which the train had departed.
Its gaze did not shift for a long time.
His consciousness felt as though it had been tossed into a furnace.
Scalding, murky, with countless tiny hammers pounding inside his skull.
Yang Yong felt that he was no longer human, but a furnace heated red-hot.
The boundary between the inside and outside of its walls blurred.
Within his body, the apertures he had painstakingly opened began shifting, one after another.
They leaped like sparks, all branding themselves onto a massive furnace, ancient, heavy, and covered in profound patterns.
It was the Ten-Thousand-Forged Primordial Furnace.
Every time the furnace swallowed an aperture, it let out a muffled boom.
As though an immensely heavy iron hammer had fallen from the void.
Yang