They walked into the dead city in the shadows of the mountains under the cover of night. A legion of thousands, each soldier carrying a blood-red totemic symbol, symbolizing the ancient lineage of the Sun's Ascendant, symbolizing their leader.

The ancient city and the bones of its citizens had long been integrated with the desert, and it was impossible to distinguish the bones and ashes from the sand. Only the tallest towers jut out above the dunes: crumbling spires sing elegy in the winds blowing in distant lands. On a broken pedestal, a huge stone statue had long since lost its torso, leaving only two legs to stand in place, and the head of a bird of prey was half-hidden by the yellow sand.

In the distant past, a major event took place in this valley, and later this city came into being.

It marks the beginning of Shurima.

At the same time, it also gave birth to its end.

No one remembers that day, except for the Celestial warriors, who now led their troops towards the jagged ruins of the city. The same group of Celestial warriors, in the turmoil that followed the betrayal of their emperor, slaughtered the city's inhabitants with their swords and witnessed the city engulfed in flames, watching its name be chiseled from the remaining steles and obelisks.

And these actions of extermination are only for the sake of futile malice.

They are said to be in vain because the slave boy from the city is long dead, and even if he is alive, he will not care about the memory of his homeland.

That man's actions destroyed the entire empire and their brotherhood.

So the warriors of the gods burned Nerima and reduced it to ashes along with his people.

The deep river of time passed indifferently, stealing the luster of the golden scroll.

Just like us, Tayanali thought to himself. With a clawed finger, he ran the lines of names and numbers over the scroll, which recorded the tithes collected at the newly built trading ports in the north at the time.

Newly built ......?

But Hagurne had been a human city for hundreds of years, and their gruff accents had long since given the name another ugly tone. Scholars may find the contents of this scroll worth studying, but in Tayanali's eyes, its only value is only for the symbolism of the era, symbolizing a world that is not crazy.

The room was once a hall for records, and the marble walls were lined with rows of bookshelves with scrolls containing tributes to the emperor, his wars, and his deeds. The space used to be very spacious, but the roof had collapsed hundreds of years ago, so the yellow sand had nearly filled most of the area.

Sensing the change in the air, he lowered the scroll and looked up.

Maiisa stood in the doorway, her figure insignificant in comparison to the size of the room, and the short black fur on Tayanali's head should be just enough to brush the beam of the door, if he could stand up straight. She was slender, even weak, but Tajanali still sensed that she possessed enough depth to make him unpredictable. A long golden hair fell around her shoulders, like the hair of a cold Northlander. She was young in appearance, but her eyes, one full blue and the other twilight purple, revealed wisdom beyond her years. She wore a thin silk robe in bright colors that did not match the desert, a string tied around her waist and a golden key hung from it. A bright purple scarf was wrapped around her neck, the end tassels twisting and twisting at her fingertips.

"They've arrived," she said.

"How many?"

"Nine armies. Nearly 10,000 soldiers. ”

Tayanali nodded, sticking out his tongue and licking his yellowed teeth. "More than I expected."

She shrugged, "They all need to come." ”

"There's been so much blood for hundreds of years," he said. "Too much raging hatred. The idea that we can live in peace with each other has long been hated by them. ”

Maisha shook her head at the stupidity. "This endless war has taken too many lives. You have killed each other with even more casualties than you have died in the mouths of the abyssal terror. ”

A hint of reproach in her flippant tone dissipated between Tayanali's thick tongue. After all, she was right.

Isn't that why he gathered his own people?

"From the moment Azir fell, a war between the Sun's bloodlines was inevitable." Tayanali said as he put away the scroll and stood up from the contemplation of ancient history. "After he left, our ambitions were too great for any of us to be leaders. There are too many visions of what the future will look like, but we are always stragglers and defeated soldiers, unable to achieve any vision of the future. ”

"It seems that the difference between you and mortals is not much in the end."

In the past, if anyone dared to say such an idea, they would definitely be killed by him, but for hundreds of years, they have brought endless wars and large-scale killings to the world, making this sentence loud and deafening.

Tayanali couldn't remember exactly when Maisha began serving her. The life span of a mortal is always fleeting, and it is always when he is not paying attention to the death of one one and his replacement for the next. But Maisha caught his attention more than any other term. Partly because of her unruliness, but there's more to it behind it. She had an insight into the mortal mind, something he and their entire race had been missing, for they had long since forsaken humanity for greater power.

It was too long ago that Tajanali was last seen as a human. He barely remembered what it was like to be a mortal, and he had lost the idea that time had passed. Ancient magic and the forges of the solar disc had reforged him, and the clumsy materials of his mortal flesh had been finely tempered into the body of a god.

Although it is a flawed and broken god, the Godhead is uncompromising.

Dressed in bronze armor and shaped like a cheetah, he was still strong and strong, though now bent by time and war. The short hair on his upper body used to be black and shiny, but the tips of his nose and the hair on his hands were already white, which was already the way he tried his best to reshape himself. Tayanali's gaze had terrified an entire army, but now he had a cracked ruby in one socket and a scar on the other, a desperate-colored stain at the corner of his eye. His spine was no longer straight, it was a great axe slash from the Battle of the Khari River, and even his flaming recovery power could not fully repair the damage.

He lifted a weapon from the table, a huge four-bladed charikar. He felt the perfect balance of the deadly blade, but more than that, he felt the weight of anticipation it carried. He sighed, slung it on his shoulder armor, and staggered over to Maisha.