“Three,” Shen Qiaoqiao whispered, checking her celestial chronometer.
Inside the subterranean sanctum of Vault #2, three miles down Galactic Wall Street, the temperature was freezing cold.
A hundred-meter-tall furnace forged from obsidian and demonic bone stood in the center of the hall. This was the Supreme Blood-Lifespan Furnace, the darkest secret of the Usury Syndicate. Massive intake pipes ran from its rusted iron hull, spreading through the stone floor like black arteries.
Ten thousand blood-loan sharks sat at obsidian desks, chanting dark usury mantras. They clacked their bone abacuses in rapid rhythm, calculating the incoming harvest of mortal lifespans.
Ancestor Xue Qidan stood on a raised platinum dais before the furnace doors. She wore robes of deep crimson silk embroidered with weeping skulls. Her long fingernails were lacquered in dried dragon blood.
Elder Xue Mo, her chief accountant, scurried up the dais stairs holding a ledger bound in dragon leather.
“Ancestor, everything is proceeding according to our grand design!” Elder Xue Mo gloated, his sunken eyes gleaming with greedy malice. “That naive boy Lin Mo wasted his wealth trying to heal those worthless peasants. He has no idea that the physical body is merely a conduit! The harder he cures them, the more vitality our blood-abacus extracts!”
