Howling blizzard winds tore across the jagged granite spires of Sector Zero-One.
At the highest precipice of the northern pass, forty miles outside the capital, twenty cloaked figures huddled around an ancient stone altar.
This was the northern dragon-vein node of Yanjing, where the earth’s natural spiritual pulse surged like an invisible river beneath the frozen bedrock.
The leader of the infiltrators was a gaunt, scar-faced man clad in dark crimson robes, known in the global underworld as Blood-Blade Yan. Across his chest hung a necklace of dried human finger bones, and a heavy Onmyoji paper fan was tucked into his belt.
Beside him, two foreign dark Onmyoji sorcerers were hammering the final three-foot iron spike into the rock. The spike was carved with jagged blood runes, glowing with a sickly, toxic violet light that hissed against the falling snowflakes.
“The nether-vein demolition array is locked,” one of the sorcerers rasped in broken Huaxia speech, his breath steaming with foul sulfur. “In five minutes, the charge will ignite. The northern dragon node will shatter, and Yanjing’s spiritual wards will collapse into complete chaos.”
“And the Murong and Huangfu families will wire the remaining forty million dollars to our Geneva accounts,” a second sorcerer laughed, wiping dark corpse-oil from his fingers. “They even opened the mountain border gates for us! Corrupt businessmen are the best employers in the world. They pay us fortunes to burn their own homeland!”
