The joyful laughter, friendly chatter, and rhythmic clatter of wooden birch bowls echoing across the Frost Valley were like poisoned needles stabbing straight into Crown Prince Zhao Lie’s ears.
Standing upon the raised dais of his Nine-Dragon War Chariot, the supreme heir to the Golden Sun Empire looked down across the snowy expanse. His mouth hung open, a string of blood-tinged spit trailing from his lip, his bloodshot eyes bulging until they seemed ready to tear free from their sockets.
His unbeatable vanguard—two hundred thousand heavily armored warriors who were supposed to trample the eastern border into a smoldering, crimson wasteland—were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on pine benches. They were happily passing jars of pickled radishes. They were dunking steamed mantou into golden congee. And down on the command knoll, his own Grand Marshal, the supreme commander of the royal armies, was kneeling in the slush. He wept with boundless thanks before a fox maiden.
“Treason...” Zhao Lie choked, his fingernails digging into the gold-trimmed chariot rail until the gold filigree bent beneath his armored knuckles. “Mutiny... Total, blasphemous treason!”
The leech-like deep-sea seed embedded deep within his sea of mind flared wildly. Black, snake-like veins erupted across Zhao Lie’s temples, writhing beneath his pale, greasy skin like a nest of disturbed centipedes. His fourth-tier Nascent Soul core spun erratically, fully overwhelmed by the insidious rotting foul fog that had clouded his judgment for weeks.
