The sound did not just strike the ears. It clawed directly into the marrow of the soul.
Five light-years of jagged brass battlements towered ahead, bristling with millions of flared horn towers.
From every horn poured the shrieking agony of trillions of bank foreclosures across a hundred thousand epochs.
Cries of evicted mothers, wails of starving orphans, and weeping of broken cultivators merged into a ceaseless sonic hurricane:
“Pay your debt! Pay your penalty interest! Your soul belongs to the vault!”
The sound waves hit the void like physical hammers, shattering drifting asteroids into powdery dust.
High atop the central sonic tower stood a gaunt demon wrapped in black leather membranes. His ears were stretched into bat-like funnels, and in his claws he held a bloodstained tuning fork.
[TARGET: WARDEN MO-YIN]
