The old man's voice sank with that gust of wind into somewhere deeper. "Senior, I saw this place at its height."
"I saw mighty cultivators of the Immortal Dao look down upon the heavens, saw the prodigies of all worlds gather in one city. I saw the mountains here, the waters here, every spiritual herb, every cloud road, every banner, as they were at their height."
"Back then, I thought..." He gave a low chuckle, something spilling into his voice that even words could not contain. "My lifetime on the Immortal Path had already been worthwhile."
"But that day, Heaven and Earth Qi changed violently. The laws turned against their order, heralding the collapse of the heavens."
"I was in the Mystic Garden then. Suddenly, the ground shook beneath my feet. I looked up and saw a fissure across the sky, tearing from the horizon to directly overhead. Within that fissure was light. That light was neither immortal light nor Dao light, but a bone-piercing light from some indescribable place, enough to shatter one's soul."
"After that, the great war against Zhetian came."
"They fell. Their Dao Fruits shattered, their souls were annihilated. Not even a final lingering thought survived. They were utterly erased."
"I saw the Immortal City, once as steadfast as a mountain, collapse with a thunderous crash in that battle. The banners atop its walls burned and went out, went out and burned again. In the end, everything burned to nothing."
"The ten thousand year spiritual herbs in the Mystic Garden turned to scorched earth inch by inch beneath the shock waves of that catastrophe. That fragrance, that fragrance which had spread thirty million li, vanished completely overnight. Through the hundreds of millions of years that followed, it never returned."
"Those cultivators whose high spirits had once