Huge blank patches appeared in the world.
And the old, weak, women, and children that He Jie and the others had been agonizing over were also cleared away like NPCs in a game with one keystroke—no pain, no struggle.
They didn’t even know what had happened; they just died in the rippling white light. Flesh melted away at high speed, their skeletons turned into brittle biscuits and then into even finer ash, yet not even the Tier Two Evolvers like He Jie could clearly see the process.
Their brains buzzed with the resonance of the blast, leaving them incapable of thought. Everyone stood frozen in place like dolls.
Only two figures were unaffected, appearing one behind the other on the train’s front.
The one in front wore a black shirt, long hair and narrow eyes; the one behind wore a great fur coat, graceful and imposing.
The scorching gale, heavy with the metallic stench of blood, swept toward them, but just as it reached them it stopped dead, blocked by a curtain of wind.
Su Huan turned his head, smiling. "I was in the car listening to you lot dithering over a little thing like this. You could’ve just called me out from the start. All right, you clean up the battlefield; I’ll go take a walk inside."
Only then did Lian Jin and the others snap out of it, their gazes trembling as they looked at the tall figure before them.
He Jie felt something inexplicable stuck in his throat, his whole body trembling. "Conductor..."
Su Huan waved his hand casually, then tore open the wind curtain. In a flicker of electric light he was already inside Chongying’s city.
Only the figure wrapped in the great fur coat could keep up with his pace.
Once they’d gone some distance, Lord Lian asked softly, "After killing so many people, you don’t have nightmares?"
"Mm-hmm-hmm..."
Su Huan let out an ambiguous little trill.
Hands in his pockets, he strolled through the lingering shockwave of the explosion. With every step he easily crossed dozens of meters, like the legendary Shrinking Ground into Inches. Even Lord Lian had to keep leaping to stay with him.
There was almost nothing left in the very center of the city; under the power of Fusion, no material could survive.
Walking over a ground like molten lava, feeling the fierce wind slicing past his ears, Lord Lian understood better than anyone how powerful this explosion had been.
If she had been standing at the exact center, she probably would have been seriously injured on the spot.
An injury worse than losing her heart.
Provided, of course, that this was the maximum power Su Huan could unleash.
But was that possible?
Thinking of those two battles, of how he’d easily toyed with her in the art she prided herself most on—hand-to-hand combat—Lord Lian felt a trace of despair.
Lost in thought, the two of them had already crossed the ruined city. Behind it lay a small lake, though its surface sat about a hundred meters lower than the city, making it look at first glance like a deep pool.
The city had been built right on the lake’s edge.
Jagged rocks surrounded the little lake; some were so smooth they looked as if they’d been often caressed, their surfaces polished to a soft luster. The lake water itself was an eerie pale black, flowing along the river behind it and eventually into the sea.
This was already the deepest part of the Four Countries Peninsula, only a hundred kilometers from the coast.
The previous explosion had of course swept over this place. The black surface of the lake heaved and churned, waves of stench rolling upward, but what was even more shocking was the heaps of bones piled like mountains along the shore.
And the layers upon layers of cages, and the bloodstained stone platforms built around the lake like some kind of altar!
From inside the cages, pairs of rotting, decayed eyes stared fixedly at the two of them.
This was clearly a human slaughterhouse!