Dense plumes of acrid dust and crushed stone slowly cleared over the shattered northern dais.
The Hall of Literary Glory reeked of burnt marrow, scorched cedar. The dry, bitter tang of burned up blood-ink. Across the audience floor, forty Imperial Censors lay dead in crumpled heaps of blackened silk, their elaborate restraint array burned up down to harmless chimney soot.
The high ritual dais—carved from dark black glass slabs and stone-hard human rib-bones—had been blasted into jagged shards by the bone-shaking heat blast wave.
Amid the broken black glass rubble, Grand Preceptor Yan stood hunched, his shredded violet robes hanging in soaked ribbons from his starved frame.
His chest bone hung wide open, sawed through years ago and pinned back with blackened iron measuring tongs to expose his hollow chest cavity. In the gaping cavity where a mortal heart should beat, the Uncanny grafts squirmed in plain view. A swollen, pitch-black demonic gallbladder throbbing with skin-burning bile, and a cluster of centipede-like leech-like sinews writhing around the fourteen-inch stone-hard bone brush skewered through his chest spine.
The quill—carved from the thigh bone of the Demonic Sage of Sins—was etched with tiny rows of blasphemous script that crawled like living maggots across the hardened bone. Its coarse gray bristles, harvested from the scalps of infant ghouls, cried nonstop drops of curdled black fluid that hissed as they ate into the shattered stone.
