Grand Preceptor Yan lay sprawled across the broken base of the marble dais, his starved frame shuddering in violent, spastic tremors.
The purple silk of his royal robes had been reduced to sodden rags, blackened by his own acid-burning bile and soaked in thick, jelly-like bright red blood.
His cracked chest cavity wheezed with every shallow, painful breath, the cut iron measuring tongs dangling loose from shattered rib ends.
Without the Demonic Sage’s stone-hard bone quill acting as a spirit spine, his withered torso was collapsing in upon itself like an empty leather waterskin.
He glared up through swollen, bloodshot eyes at the towering warrior standing before him.
Even at death’s door, eighty years of royal entitlement and dynastic arrogance poisoned his tongue.
“You think... You have won?” Yan gurgled, black foam bubbling from between his yellowed teeth. “You’re merely... A dog with an ox-cleaver. The Emperor... The Son of Heaven... Sits upon the Golden Throne above. His flesh is wedded... To the Dragon of Sins itself!”
Yan coughed wildly, spraying flecks of black lung tissue across his lap.
