The five-hundred-pound slab of glass-fused mantle stone cracked beneath Lu Chen’s retreating boot.
A blast wave of boiled marrow and ozone rolled off his shoulders as he cleared the dark rock trench. Behind him, three miles down the rotting fault line, the cut leftovers of the Three Disaster Guards were still turning to ash. The Specter Primarch’s incorporeal shroud had dissolved into pale grease. The Taboo Sovereign’s broken bronze sigils were melting into puddles of green melted rock waste. And the Corpse Demiurge’s hundred-foot torso of stone-hard sinew lay sliced into eighteen glowing segments, each cross-section sizzling at twelve hundred degrees.
In Lu Chen’s right fist, the Primordial Core-Shattering God Cleaver hummed with heavy, terrifying lethality.
Fifty pounds of star-lead and core-mantle orichalcum rested in his grip as though weightless. Its nonstop star-fire edge glowed violet-white, casting sharp, shifting shadows against the black rock walls. Every drop of foul guard blood that touched the blade boiled away with a high-pitched sound whistle. That left the polished iron spine cold, gray, and spotless.
Inside his sea of mind, the harvest was roaring.
Twelve thousand units of purified flat malice swirled within the Asura Crucible like a hurricane of black lightning. The pressure was huge. It was the largest single pool of malice Lu Chen had ever piled up since he first pried open a coffin lid in Black Water County.
