The Divine Lady stood where the scorched earth was most severe.
At Her feet lay soil churned up by cannon fire, and the air was thick with the stench of sulfur mixed with blood.
The path of flowers behind Her continued to spread silently. Various blooms blossomed along the trail of Her footsteps, like a ribbon embroidered with the colors of spring trailing across the blackened earth.
Before Her was a different sight: stretches of scorched earth, broken halberds and shattered spears thrust into the ground, and destroyed cannon carriages lying in disarray, their wooden hubs still smoldering.
The city guards knelt prostrate on the ground.
Some barely supported themselves with broken blades, some clutched their mangled limbs, and some trembled with intense emotion...
Many more were covered in blood, their wounds still seeping through their armor, yet they forced themselves to stay upright, refusing to collapse.
They all gazed at the deity before them with devout faces, the fervor in their eyes almost overflowing.
The Divine Lady’s gaze swept across the faces of the city guards.
That gaze was not a haughty look from above, nor was it the usual pity or sympathy of a benefactor.
There was only a faint, profound sorrow.
“War is merciless,” Her voice was not loud, yet it was as clear as a mountain spring striking stone. “The common people suffer.”
These few words struck a chord in everyone’s hearts.
Tears finally broke through their defenses and poured out.
It was not because of the pain.
It was because a deity could see their suffering.
This was a deity—a supreme being from on high. What virtue did they possess to deserve even a side-long glance from Her?
The Divine Lady gave a soft sigh.
This sigh was extremely light, like the sound of the last flower of spring falling, almost inaudible.
“The suffering you endure today began because of Me. I feel guilt in My heart, and compassion has stirred within Me.”
The moment the sigh fell, She slowly closed Her eyes.
A single tear slid from the corner of the Divine Lady’s eye.
That tear was not transparent. The moment it left Her eye, it transformed into a pale pink bead, like a drop of dew condensed on a petal at dawn, saturated by the morning glow.
The bead fell slowly through the air.
Its speed was unnaturally slow, allowing everyone to see the shifting luster on its surface.
What the luster reflected was not the current battlefield, but mountains covered in blooming flowers.
Within this teardrop, a distant and beautiful dream without war seemed to be sealed.
After a long moment, the bead finally touched the ground and shattered into millions of tiny, fine points of light. Like a silent spring rain, they diffused in all directions.
Where the points of light landed, fine cracks appeared in the scorched earth.
What surged from the cracks was not water, but life.
The first to change were the old trees that had been blasted to stumps by the cannons. On the charred, coal-black trunks, tender green buds vied to emerge from the cracks.
In an instant, they unfurled into palm-sized leaves. The leaves sprouted new branches, which rapidly grew thick and long.
In the span of a single breath, a scorched and dead tree became lush and verdant again, casting a thick canopy of shade that covered ten yards of ground.
Then came the wild flowers on the ground.
Countless flower buds emerged from the soil simultaneously, covering the originally scorched earth and blooming toward the sun.
Next were the wounded city guards.
At the foot of the city wall, a soldier whose legs had been blown off and who had fainted from blood loss actually sat up. He stared blankly down at his newly regrown calves.
“Ah... ah...” His lips trembled violently, his eyes filling with tears of shock, joy, and fear. “My legs... my legs are back...”
He could not say anything else.
He could only use his calloused hands to stroke his new legs over and over again.
The entire battlefield fell silent for a moment.
Then, a cacophony of voices erupted.
“My hand! My hand grew back!”
“All the wounds on my body are healed!”
“Heavens... oh, Heavens...”
“It’s not the Heavens, it’s the Divine Lady!”
“The Divine Lady saved us!”
This reminder alerted everyone. Countless pairs of eyes turned in unison toward that pale pink figure.
The soldiers, who had been immersed in shock and wild joy, knelt one after another, their foreheads touching the ground.
“The Divine Lady is merciful!”
“Thank you, Divine Lady! Thank you for your great kindness!”
Cries, laughter, the sound of kowtowing, words of gratitude, and gasps of people checking each other’s wounds spread out in waves from the base of the city gate like boiling water, merging into a great tide of sound.
Suddenly, someone said in a trembling voice, “You... look quickly... look at the Divine Lady’s hair...”
He stared at the Divine Lady, and the image reflected in his pupils caused all the color to drain from his face in an instant.
Everyone looked up.
The Divine Lady still stood in the same spot, wearing the same pale pink magnificent robes, holding the lotus. The faint halo around Her had not yet dissipated, and Her face remained hidden in the haze.
Everything seemed normal.
Except for Her long, silken black hair, which was undergoing a change.
What had been waist-length hair as black as ink was now turning white, inch by inch.
The whiteness began to spread from the tips.
It was a silver-white of absolute purity, as if the clear glow of a full moon had been drawn into threads and woven into Her hair, strand by strand.
It carried a beauty that made one’s heart ache.
“Divine Lady, Your hair!”
“How could this happen...”
Exclamations rose from all sides, mixed with panic and heartbreak, as well as an unspeakable guilt.
“The Divine Lady must have exhausted Her own cultivation to save us... that’s why... that’s why...”
When the person reached that point, they could not go on, but all the city guards knew what he meant.
It felt as if all their hearts were being squeezed by the same hand.
Indeed, how could one defy heaven to change fate without paying a price? Even a deity likely could not avoid the backlash.
“No... it shouldn't be like this...”
“Divine Lady! We beg You to take back Your divine power!”
“Our lives are lowly; we are not worth this!”
“We beg You not to defy heaven to change fate for us...”
Everyone cried out and kowtowed in unison.
Shen Jue and Pei Du naturally saw the Divine Lady’s black hair turn white as well. Their hearts were filled with a complex mix of emotions.
The Divine Lady cherished the people of the world even more than they had imagined.
As for Luo Daoqing, he had long been dumbstruck.
He was a staunch materialist, but everything happening before his eyes could not be explained by science at all!
If he had known the other party was a real deity, he wouldn't have dared to oppose Her even if he had a hundred times more courage!
Wait, was it too late to kneel and beg for mercy now?
【Luo Daoqing Shock Value +100】
【Shen Jue Shock Value +100】
【Pei Du Shock Value +100】
【...】
【Current Shock Value: 376,800】
Yun Shu watched the reactions of the crowd and the skyrocketing Shock Value on the screen, knowing She had achieved Her goal.
Thus.
She spoke the lines She had prepared in advance. “I am not defying heaven to change fate; I am reversing karma.”
“Your lives were not meant to end here.” She paused slightly, looking toward Luo Daoqing. “It is this person from the future who acted recklessly and disrupted the karma of the Heavenly Dao, causing the common people to suffer.”
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