The living civil war began at the tiny cellular level.
Within Osric Malveaux’s huge, ruined chest cavity, the two hundred drops of acid-burn denaturant acted like an incendiary spark dropped into a dry ammunition bunker. The denaturing spark didn’t attack Osric’s living tissue directly. Its atom-deep stonework was engineered to cleave only the man-made peptide bonds and immunosuppressive polymer coatings that had disguised the twelve divine beast organs from one another for one hundred and sixty years.
Those biochemical veils dissolved. Then, the twelve divine organs woke up to an unimaginable horror.
They weren’t parts of a unified god. They were twelve ancient, incompatible old family lineages crammed into a single rotting cage, drowning in one another’s toxic byproducts.
The first organ to react was the Asura Drake heart.
Sense nerve endings lining the drake heart’s heart walls detected the presence of alien, cold-blooded tissue from the next-door deep-sea Giant beast gills and the sky Qilin lung. Driven by millions of years of fiery apex hunting beast instinct, the drake heart interpreted the surrounding organs as invading parasites attempting to feed upon its core.
THUMP-THUMP!
The drake heart tightened with furious, wild violence, pumping boiling, two-thousand-degree pyrogenic aether-blood directly into the surrounding around the heart cavity. The white-hot fluid flash-boiled the fluid-draining fluid in Osric’s mediastinum. It filled his chest with screaming steam that burst through his cracked silver-steel ribs. The intense heat scorched the inside lining of his chest cavity. That turned connective tissue into charred black carbon.
