The barbed iron links tore through the mountain mist with the shrill whistle of a dropping hawk.
Forged from cold-cooled black iron and hardened in the rotting fat of corpse-beasts, the Soul-Shackling Chain was designed to ensnare the spirit veins of living creatures. Even a hardened Foundation-stage fighter struck by its jagged teeth would feel their spiritual sea freeze into painful sludge. The heavy iron loop plummeted toward the azure slime. Then, the cornered fox maiden couldn’t hold back a hoarse, desperate cry:
“Watch out! It binds the soul!”
Lin Xiao didn’t dodge.
In his last life, Lin Xiao had watched enough slow-motion safety training videos to know that ducking away from high-speed pulling steel usually resulted in a fractured collarbone. But more importantly, he was no longer a frail mortal with brittle calcium bones and fragile tendons. He was an elastic, non-Newtonian Primordial Chaos Slime with an internal Dantian Void capable of sub-core atom-deep digestion.
And according to the Omniscient Dao Spirit, this hideous slaver implement was ninety-two percent pure elemental iron.
As the heavy barbed chain struck his upper hemisphere, Lin Xiao didn’t flinch. Instead, his azure surface melted at the point of contact. It stretched into a cavernous, swirling void maw:
GLOOP!
The leading three feet of barbed chain vanished into his semi-clear blue center like a strand of thick ramen sinking into a bowl of broth.
Hu Meng’s sneer froze on his scarred face. His calloused hands jerked backward on instinct, bracing his heels against the gravel to snap the chain taut and tear the little blue creature in two. “Got you, you little—”
The sentence died in his throat.
The chain didn’t snap taut. There was no sickening sound of tearing flesh, no eruption of blue slime across the moss. Instead, an irresistible gravity pull grabbed the leftover seventeen feet of cold-iron chain. He dragged it forward with terrifying, high-pressure driving force.
Slurp!
Crunch-crunch!
Inside Lin Xiao’s Primordial Void, the non-Newtonian impact-hardening fluid instantly locked into diamond-hard crystal-clear plates. The crushing force of a five-thousand-pound heavy-duty high-pressure press clamped down upon the barbed iron links. Sub-atom-deep chaos qi flooded the metal, instantly dissolving the vile corpse-oil coating into harmless carbonized smoke. Meanwhile, the high-thickness cold iron was masticated, crushed, and crushed into glistening metal marrow.
To the horrified onlookers, it sounded as though someone was enthusiastically chewing through a basket of extra-crispy fried dough twists.
Crunch! Slurp! Crunch!
“What... What are you doing?” Hu Meng shrieked, his boots skidding across the mossy shale as he was dragged two paces forward. “Let go! That’s a Grade-1 Spirit Ancient object!”
“I told you, it’s far too loud for the evening,” Lin Xiao replied through the psychic air, his azure body casually bobbing up and down. “Though I must admit, the texture is surprisingly satisfying. A little heavy on the sulfur. The corpse-oil needed several cloves of garlic to mask the gaminess, but the iron marrow has a lovely nutty finish.”
Slurp!
Another five feet of chain disappeared into his belly.
Hu Meng pulled with all his might, the veins in his thick neck bulging like angry purple worms. His two henchmen stared in numbed horror as their fearsome leader engaged in an absurd, one-sided tug-of-war against a bouncy blue jelly ball that didn’t even have feet planted on the ground. Lin Xiao wasn’t even straining. By converting a fraction of the absorbed striking force into heavy local gravity mass, he weighed roughly as much as an anchored granite monolith.
With one final, joyful gulp, the last links of the twenty-foot chain were sucked into Lin Xiao’s semi-clear mantle.
Gulp!
Lin Xiao let out a tiny, delicate burp. A wisp of pale grey, odorless vapor puffed from his top. It dissolved harmlessly into the mountain breeze.
Hu Meng stumbled backward onto his rear. He stared at his empty, calloused hands in utter, mind-shattering disbelief. The cursed weapon that had bound thirty spirit beasts and terrorized the borderlands for five years had simply ceased to exist.
“He... He ate it,” the rat-eyed crossbowman stammered, his knees knocking together beneath his leather tunic. “Brother Hu, he ate the Soul-Shackling Chain like a snack!”
“Shoot him!” Hu Meng roared from the dirt, his face purple with humiliation and pure panic. “Shoot the monster! Turn him into a pincushion!”
The crossbowman snapped out of his daze, raised his repeating hand-crossbow. Then he pulled the bronze trigger three times in rapid row.
Thwip-thwip!
Three black-iron quarrels, dipped in rotting ghost venom, hissed through the five paces separating them. He struck Lin Xiao directly in his curved front.
At the exact heartbeat of impact, Lin Xiao’s fluid surface underwent an instant phase shift. The fluid molecules locked together, shifting from soft gelatin into iron-hard dilatant armor:
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
The three iron bolts shattered upon contact, their metal tips flattened into dull coins that clattered uselessly onto the moss. Lin Xiao didn’t even wobble.
Now, Xiao Hei, Lin Xiao commanded across the Primordial Soul Circuit. Subdue them. Clean and non-lethal.
By your will, Master!
From the deep purple shadows cast by the western cliff face, the tightly packed black hound exploded into motion.
Xiao Hei didn’t need his full eight-foot war-beast size to deal with mortal cutthroats. In his compact, golden-retriever-sized form, his spiritual mass was packed into a lethal, faster-than-sound bullet. He crossed the twenty paces in less than a tenth of a second, leaving behind a crescent-shaped empty pocket trail that howled through the ravine.
The rat-eyed crossbowman didn’t even have time to scream.
A gust of razor-sharp silver wind clipped the crossbow from his grip, cleanly shearing the wooden stock in two without scratching his fingers. An instant later, a black glass paw pressed down upon his chest bone with the unmoving weight of a falling anvil. The crossbowman slammed into the gravel, the breath exploding from his lungs in a wheezing gasp as he was pinned firmly to the earth.
Above him, Xiao Hei bared his gleaming ivory fangs, his ruby eyes glowing with cold, sky starlight. A low, low, deep growl shook in the hound’s throat. It shook the man’s teeth so hard he right away wet his trousers.
The third rogue—the muscular thug carrying the serrated bone-hooks—dropped his weapons with a clatter, raising both hands into the air as his knees buckled. “I surrender! Don’t eat my soul! I’m just hired muscle!”
Hu Meng, scrambling backward against a mossy boulder, reached wildly into his tunic with trembling fingers. His eyes were wide with the crazed hysteria of a trapped rat. He pulled out a jagged, crimson magic charm parchment painted with human blood.
“If I’m dying here, we’re all dying together!” Hu Meng screamed, channeling his meager Foundation-stage qi into the paper. “Blood-Burning Curse! Burn into ash, you demonic—”
“Target attempting volatile heat release,” the Dao Spirit alerted Lin Xiao. “Moving neutralizer recommended.”
Way ahead of you, Lin Xiao thought.
Lin Xiao drew upon his internal water pool. It packed a pocket of chilled spring fluid within his basal ring. He didn’t use a lethal hydro-blade. He had no interest in painting the scenic ravine with human entrails. Instead, he shaped the water into two broad, blunt, high-pressure hydro-slugs, roughly the size and weight of iron-heavy bowling balls:
THUMP!
Twin blasts of high-pressure water erupted from Lin Xiao’s azure flanks with the bone-shaking boom of a double-barreled cannon.
The water slugs crossed the clearing in a flash of white spray. It struck Hu Meng and the surrendering thug square in their chests. The blunt striking force lifted both grown men fully off their feet, launching them fifty paces backward through the air in an undignified arc.
CRASH!
With a loud mix of snapping branches and startled bird cries, Hu Meng and his henchman landed head-first in the dense, thorny crown of an ancient hardwood tree sixty feet up the northern embankment. Their legs dangled uselessly in the air, their weapons gone, their blood-magic charm washed away into the moss, knocked out cold before they even hit the boughs.
Silence dropped upon the cul-de-sac.
The only leftover slaver—the crossbowman pinned beneath Xiao Hei’s paw—lay fully motionless, pretending to be a corpse and praying to every god he had ever heard of that the blue ball wouldn’t decide to eat him next.
Lin Xiao wobbled slightly, letting out a small, satisfied fluid ripple. He extended a slender azure tendril. He dusted off a stray pine needle that had settled upon his dome.
A bronze chime chimed in his mind. It was followed by the crisp, dispassionate test of the Omniscient Dao Spirit:
A fifteen percent boost to membrane pulling resilience just from eating a bully’s weapon, Lin Xiao mused, admiring the subtle, rainbow-bright sheen that now rippled across his azure surface. In the human world, they charge fortunes for iron supplements and protein shakes. Out here, rude trespassers deliver them straight to my mouth.
Turning around, Lin Xiao bounded lightly across the gravel, coming to a halt three feet from the base of the limestone cliff.
The fox maiden was still leaning against the rock, her breath coming in shallow, shuddering gasps. Her wide amethyst eyes darted from the empty space where the iron chain had been, to the two men dangling unconscious in the high tree branches, to the terrifying black hound holding the third slaver in silent submission.
Finally, her gaze dropped back to the little blue slime.
Her lips parted, trembling with shock, confusion, and the overwhelming fog of venom coursing through her veins.
“You... You swallowed Grade-1 Cold Sanguine Iron...” she whispered, her voice failing as her knees gave way beneath her. “Without an alchemy crucible... Without refining fire... Who are you?”
Before Lin Xiao could reply, the dark veins of Ghost-Weeping venom reached her throat. Her eyelids fluttered, her body slumped forward. The runaway fox maiden collapsed into the soft mountain moss, slipping into complete darkness.