Rain hissed against the scorching granite stones between the two men.
Grandmaster Yu stood at the foot of the terrace steps, his eight-foot dragon-bone staff planted like a headsman’s pillar into the flat stone slabs.
From his exposed chest, the crimson Asura lungs pumped with violent, rhythmic wheezes. The silver wire stitches strained against his graying skin, leaking oily green necro-fluid that sizzled into toxic vapor as it hit the rain.
“You speak of dead men’s meat as though it were a crime,” Yu rasped.
His yellow eyes bore into Lu Chen with the cold, unblinking arrogance of a hunting beast perched above a slaughterhouse.
“Look around you, boy,” Yu continued. He gestured with his bony, ring-crusted left hand toward the grand city below the crags. “The Great Yong Dynasty is a bloated corpse floating down the river. The royal dragon vein was cut seventy years ago.”
The old tyrant took a heavy step forward. His iron-banded staff left a charred ring on the wet flat stone slabs.
“In Black Water County, your judges hide behind paper wards while ghouls drag women from their beds,” Yu snarled. “In the country guard posts, three thousand levy soldiers die in a single night when a water specter opens its maw.”
