They looked toward the sound.
The Thunder Sea churned, lightning crisscrossing through it. Countless thunder serpents descended from the heavens, bathing the entire mining vein in flickering light.
Heaven and earth seemed to rage without end.
Yet upon the ground-
There was only the mechanical, monotonous rumble of hammering.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud!
The sound was dull and slow, without rhythm or emotion, as though those laboring were not living beings, but hollow bodies stripped of their souls, repeating an action they could never stop.
Gale winds swept up rubble and bone ash.
Rain mingled with lightning fire, scouring blackened gullies into the ground.
The cultivators mining there wore tattered robes. Their skin was scorched and cracked, their bodies covered in burns left by the backlash of lightning. Some had already had half their bodies reduced to charcoal, yet still swung their mining hammers.
They did not speak.
They did not curse.
They did not even suffer.
There was only numbness.
As though even the very act of "living" had been worn smooth by the passing years.
Another bolt of lightning struck.
Boom!
A cultivator turned to ash without even a scream.
The person beside him merely shifted slightly to one side and continued digging.
No one stopped.
No one looked back.
As though death were the most ordinary thing here.
The sight made several sect disciples' pupils contract slightly, and they could not help drawing in sharp breaths.
Deeper within the mining vein, the terrain sank lower still.
Countless withered bones lay piled there.
Some still sat cross-legged, as though they had attempted to resist the mining vein's environmental backlash through cultivation, only to fail in the end.
Some gripped mining tools tightly in both hands, never releasing them even in death.
Other bones had been crystallized by lightning