The mist clinging to the floor of the Primordial Tablet Forest didn’t originate from water vapor. It was condensed psychic pressure, boiled off from thirty thousand First Epoch megaliths that had stood in silent contemplation since the dawn of the Jiuzhou Plane. Every cubic foot of air was soaked with crushing spiritual gravity. To an ordinary fighter, stepping past the cedar treeline felt like wading into a lake of cold, churning liquid silver.
Across the sprawling clearing, hundreds of young fighters from thirty sovereign empires were sprawled in various stages of spiritual collapse. A golden-robed scion from the Northern Sea Dragon Palace knelt in the damp moss. It tore at his scalp with bloody fingernails while weeping into his sleeves. Nearby, a seventh-generation sword prodigy lay flat on his back, staring blankly at the canopy while thin ribbons of dark red blood trickled steadily from both ears.
Two medical attendants in white robes rushed past carrying a stretcher loaded with a convulsing youth who was babbling fragmented stanzas of ancient sky-high mathematics.
“Steady his tongue!” one medic shouted wildly. “He stared at Monolith Seventeen for nine breaths! His Sea of Mind has suffered three concurrent spirit fractures!”
Amid this landscape of spiritual trauma and intellectual ruin, a steady, rhythmic sound echoed along the flat stone slab path.
