471: Chapter 471 The Fire Went Out

The hearthfire has gone out.

It wasn't blown out by the wind.

It was snuffed out by those "awakened" things, using pure malice and their very existence.

As the last lingering shadow of light and heat vanished, the temperature did not drop—instead, it was replaced by something else, something older and more viscous.

This was not cold, but "emptiness," "silence"—something accumulated after being utterly forgotten, capable of rotting even the Soul into mire.

The giant claw of the Sky Burial Beast hovered there.

In this pause, there was no hesitation, no pity, only a bone-chilling, almost lazy scrutiny belonging to a higher-level existence.

Like a mischievous child using a magnifying glass to focus the sun's rays on a line of ants.

He would watch with great interest as they tried to escape, curled up, and turned into tiny scorch marks.

Now, they were that line of ants. And the Sky Burial Beast was the child, the lens, and even more so, that beam of sunlight cast from a more distant, more ruthless place.

It slowly withdrew its claw.

Not out of mercy.

It was because the feast had not truly begun. The main course required more diners—or rather, more sacrifices—to highlight its value.

Then, deep within the Burial Land, a crack split open.

This was not a sound. It was the noise of the "concept" itself snapping.

It was as if the cornerstone supporting this scorched earth, named "Eternal Suppression," had been forced open by billions of years of pent-up resentment at some incomprehensible node, splitting a hairline crack.

The crack spread and burst open.

The first "wound" appeared.

Pitch-black, its edges were a flowing, writhing, shapeless darkness. It was like a rotting wound torn into the earth that would never heal.

A second. A third.

They were no longer scenes to be "seen," but primal totems of terror itself, branded directly into the Sea of Consciousness.

Billions of years ago, the "errors" and "taboos" that had been personally snuffed out, stripped of their names, their meaning of existence, and even their right to be remembered by the existence known as the "Lord of Burials," were now breaking out of their "eternal" coffins, crawling toward this shallow shore called the "mortal world" which they should never have touched again.

From the first crack, a skeletal hand reached out.

It was too massive.

The mere action of five phalanges slightly spreading and pressing against the edges of the crack made the scorched earth for hundreds of miles around groan under the unbearable weight.

The earth was not shaking—it was "bulging" upward, like the skin of a sleeping behemoth being violently pushed from below into a constantly rising, massive hump.

Soil, gravel, and something pitch-black and oily from deeper down surged up together.

The phalanges were not deathly white, but a dark gray settled over endless eons.

Coiled upon them were dark red muscles and tendons, long shriveled but not yet completely rotted.

Those muscles pulsed slowly and infinitesimally, like the final tremors of a dying heart, or like countless tiny, eyeless worms burrowing inside, bringing an ultimate sensation of a "living dead thing" that desecrated life.

It gripped tightly and exerted force. A sound so low it surpassed the limits of hearing, felt only through the chest, as if the tectonic plates were being violently torn apart—

"Screeech—"

ground against everyone's nerves.

What it dragged out was half a face.

The severed half had a cross-section as smooth as the finest obsidian mirror, reflecting the distorted light and shadow of this maddened world, as well as the figures of the five people below, as minuscule as mayflies.

On the remaining half of the face, the skin clung tightly to the high cheekbones, a stone-like slate gray.

A single vertical pupil turned slowly, frame by frame, focusing from an extremely distant place.

The sky was no longer the sky, but had become a cracked black drumhead pulled upward by an invisible, colossal force.

Every time a crack burst open, it was accompanied by a low "buzz" that surpassed hearing and directly vibrated the Soul. This was not a sound, but the groan of the Burial Land's structure itself, the cornerstone of the concept of "Eternal Suppression" being pried open after billions of years by the long-boiling resentment within, starting from the tiniest crevice—the first, and also the last, rupture.

The appearance of this skeletal hand was not just "massive."

As it pressed against the edge of the crack and slowly, with a grating friction, arched the scorched earth for a hundred miles around like a carpet, a deeper, more fundamental "heavy pressure" descended.

It was not physical gravity, but the weight of "existence" itself. Merely with the emergence of the "phalanges," the Laws of this space began to warp and become sticky.

Light no longer traveled in straight lines; instead, it bent and folded gloomily, casting toward that skeletal hand, as if even "light" itself was afraid and taking a detour.

A pungent odor filled the air, a mixture of rock dust, aged blood rust, and an even more indescribable decay belonging to the "corpse of time."

Every wriggle of the dark red muscles coiled around the phalanges carried a precision that desecrated life.

This was no unconscious twitching; it was more like billions of microscopic, eyeless worms, driven by some residual, long-distorted instinct, still executing movements like "contraction" and "relaxation" that belonged to "living things."

Every minute pull of the tendon fibers brought up a smear of viscous, almost gelatinous dark liquid, which dripped onto the bulging scorched earth below, instantly eating through it to form bottomless holes with a sizzling sound like strong acid corrosion.

Its dragging motion was so heavy that even time seemed to stagnate.

Accompanied by that tectonic-tearing screech, the crack was forced wider, spewing forth a darkness so dense it could not be dispersed, as if containing the accumulated despair of countless epochs.

Then, there was that half of a face.

On the smooth cross-section of the severed half, there was no void.

Like the deepest, darkest black mirror, it could not reflect the Sky Burial Beast at this moment, nor the raging blood mist, nor even the five tiny sacrifices below.

What it reflected were fragmented, constantly flashing and vanishing scenes of horror: mountains of broken corpses of gods and demons, a towering sea of blood, silent wails, and a final, utterly indifferent, blurry silhouette that consigned all glory and terror to "burial and destruction"...

These were the memory fragments carried by the "severed" other half of this Necro-Bone Titan's existence—the last glimpse of the Lord of Burials' power and cruelty before its Eternal Suppression.

On the remaining half of the face, the slate-gray skin tightly wrapped around the high cheekbones and brow ridges, its texture like ancient rock weathered for ten thousand years.

A single vertical pupil.

Crimson, as if condensed from the purest resentment and unwillingness.

There was no fire deep within the pupil; it was a blood-colored ice crystal of deathly silence, unmelting through the ages.

Sharp.

Cold.

Bearing an absolute blade that severed all life.

Its "sweep" did not even deserve to be called a "gaze."

It was more like an unconscious "information sweep" on the level of existence.

The five people below, along with the newly bulged land beneath their feet, were no different from dust, soil, rocks, and the broken fragments of Laws just squeezed out of the air by its very existence, in its perception that spanned billions of years.

This was a fundamental "disregard" more thorough than any contempt or ignoring—

they were simply not within the "cognition" of such an existence.

"...Necro... Bone... Titan..."

Cang Ming's voice sounded as if it were being pried out, thread by thread, from the cracks of a completely frozen Soul.

The starlight around his body had long been extinguished. The simulated stars within him seemed to have been ground into powder by an invisible, colossal force, leaving only cold darkness.

His throat convulsed uncontrollably, and every word was accompanied by a violent urge to dry heave, as if he were about to cough up his heart and lungs.

What he saw in his eyes was not just that half skeletal face towering between heaven and earth.

It was also a corner of the "Eternal Tomb-Keeping" system represented behind it, forged with unimaginable power and cruelty by the Lord of Burials, which had long since been annihilated before the fault lines of history.

"Tomb-Keepers"...

They were actually standing at the entrance of this "tomb." And moreover, as "sacrifices."

Ling's voice sounded immediately after, sharper and more shattered than the trembling hum of the damaged insect wings behind her back.

This was the residue of knowledge squeezed out by instinct after fear had pierced through reason:

"Blood Infant... Mist Nightmare..."

She stared intently at the crimson blood mist spreading from the second crack.

The shapeless shadows swimming in the mist, with every "clack, clack" of their gnashing teeth, seemed to be gnawing at her nerves.

"Primeval Blood Clan... the entire clan... refined into... mist... eternal... wailing..."

Her words were fragmented.

Because what the blood mist emitted was not just the sweet metallic smell of rust and decay.

It was also a most vicious curse reaching deep into the Soul, belonging to an entire "clan" that had been completely wiped out, stripped of even their individual existence and the right to die, and forcibly blended into a form of eternal agony.

Merely by "perceiving" the existence of this mist, the equally ancient and cold genetic fragments belonging to the "Zerg" within Ling's body wailed and trembled.