At every wood slot and wooden peg, the Hall of Supreme Harmony was coming apart.
Massive nanmu wood pillars, three arm-spans thick and lacquered in royal red stone, groaned under unbearable twisting strain before snapping like dry kindling. Above the shattered dais, the gold-trimmed ceiling rained heavy roof tiles into the rising rotten-egg mist below.
On the cratered flat stone slabs beside the underground earth-shaking fissure, the Great Yong Emperor knelt in the pool of black rotting gore pouring from the split skull of the Dragon of Sins.
The monstrous dragon-build lay dead, its huge horned head split from brow to palate by Lu Chen’s last blow. Yet in his feral desperation to cheat death, the dying monarch clawed at the beast’s cut spinal marrow, attempting a forbidden soul-binding graft.
“Mortal cur!” the Emperor shrieked, his voice bubbling with black gall-blood as he jammed the dragon’s leftover marrow into his own open chest bone. “This throne is the altar of heaven! The dragon vein shall swallow your marrow!”
Lu Chen didn’t retreat thirty paces.
He stood barely three paces away at the lip of the fissure, his boots rooted into the melting stone. His corded chest gleamed with burnished temple gold under the falling embers.
