Screams of terror and the violent splintering of test tables echoed through the underground mint.
The auction crowd had fully dissolved into wild panic.
Corrupt scribes, masked merchants, and renegade sect elders trampled velvet cushions and overturned dark wood furniture, slipping over dropped bags of dead men’s silver as they jammed the dry sewer under-road drains in a desperate bid to escape. The surviving veiled executioners abandoned their iron axe-spears, fleeing the nauseating reek of ancient grave rot billowing from Auctioneer Yan’s mutated frame.
Above them, hanging jars of green corpse-fat candles swung in wild arcs from iron chains, throwing jagged shadows across the blood-slicked stone.
Lu Chen stepped between An Ni and the lunging horror.
His twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver rested poised at an angle of thirty degrees before his right knee, its notched iron spine humming with latent heat tension as the six demon-bone scythes jutting from Yan’s spine clicked against the dark rock floor.
His gaze tracked the six demon-bone scythes with clean, steady care.
Three pairs of said clearlyjoints, each anchored with crude iron rivets directly down to the bone surface of Yan’s lower-back bones.
