The medical heart monitor beside the wrecked shuttle flatlined with a long, piercing tone.
Lin Shan lay motionless on the emergency gurney. His sunken eyes were half-open, glazed and dark. His chest had ceased rising, and his shriveled, eighty-five-year-old fingers dangled limply off the metal edge. Thin wisps of black soul-smoke leaked from his nostrils, signaling that his spiritual soul was beginning to detach from his physical flesh.
High above the hospital flight deck, Ancestor Xue Qidan’s hundred-mile crimson hologram threw back her head and laughed.
“Look at him, Lin Mo!” Xue Qidan’s voice rolled across the clouds like poisonous thunder. “He is dead! The first of three hundred billion! Every sixty seconds, another million souls will rot! Ten minutes are ticking away! Transfer one hundred quadrillion crystals, or your precious hospital will become the largest morgue in the Milky Way!”
On the skybridge fifty feet above the deck, a fat man dressed in sterile green silk leaned over the glass balustrade.
It was Doctor Du, Vault #2’s chief medical broker. A goodness score of negative sixty-six hovered in sickly red numbers above his oily forehead. In his hands, he held a thick, gold-embossed catalog of pharmaceutical bonds.
“Did you hear the matriarch, Chairman Lin?” Doctor Du sneered, his voice oily and mocking. “Your little charity hospital does not possess the alchemy to dissolve bloodline necrosis! But Vault #2 is generous! We have two hundred thousand Blood-Lotus Suppression Pills in our orbital warehouse! Only ten billion Origin Dao Crystals per…
