The white sound bell shattered into glittering golden sparks as the corpse-fire breath washed harmlessly against the royal pillars.
Dense black smoke billowed through the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
Where the rotting dragon flame had struck the three-foot-thick nanmu columns, ancient vermilion lacquer bubbled, charred. Then it turned to drifting ash.
The roof groaned above them, its hundred-ton cedar beams shuddering under the sound blast wave.
Across the shattered jade dais, the chimeric monster coiled.
The Great Yong Emperor’s upper torso, clothed in ragged dragon-stitched yellow silks, was fused at the hips into the rotting skull of the Dragon of Sins.
His withered neck stretched at an unnatural angle, tendons pulled taut like stone-hard gutstrings.
His yellowed eyes, fully empty of pupils, fixed upon Lu Chen through the hanging veil of sulfur soot.
