The underground cave smelled of scorched limestone, sweet rotting peach flesh, and stale bile.
Three hundred feet below the grand hall of the Hundred Blossom Sect, the ceiling vanished into darkness, lost beneath hanging clusters of stringy, pulsing gu-cocoons.
Every cocoon cried sluggish drops of milky fluids onto the jagged floor below.
At the center of the chamber, the Mother-Gu Queen reared thirty feet into the humid air.
Her segmented torso was clad in overlapping plates of dark violet hard shell, thick as temple foundation stones.
Dozens of barbed, scythe-like limbs clattered against the damp stone, each barb dripping an oily, emerald neurotoxin that hissed wherever it touched the granite.
Beneath her hard-shelled cowl, three pairs of milky compound eyes tracked the heat streaming from Lu Chen’s chest.
Ten paces before the beast stood Patriarch Bai Hua.
