The tension between the iron cleaver and the stone-hard dragon-bone staff held for only half a heartbeat.
It knelt on the fractured marble terrace. Grandmaster Yu felt the unbearable heat streaming from the notched blade above him.
The seventy-four-degree heat edge was actively melting the lacquered resin coating the stone-hard bone.
Yu’s wrist bones groaned, small hairline fractures splintering through his radius and forearm bone under forty-five thousand pounds of downward pressure.
In a wild bid for survival, the Red-Winged Asura lung inside Yu’s chest convulsed.
The demonic organ pumped a surge of thick, sticky, black fight-or-flight rush through the old man’s rotted blood-vessel tree.
Yu’s withered left arm swelled with knotted, purple veins. He threw his weight upward, attempting to lever the cleaver away and drive an iron-tipped boot into Lu Chen’s groin.
Lu Chen didn’t allow the counter-lever to form.
