Atop the snowy ridge where thirty demonic siege engines had stood only moments before, Lin Xiao’s round blue body began to swell like a teakettle coming to a furious boil.
His semi-clear sapphire jelly swelled to twice its normal width, wobbling erratically in the snow. Inside his dantian, the vast volume of tightly packed gases generated by the instant core smelting of sixty thousand jin of rotting bone-iron pressed outward against his elastic membranes.
Lin Xiao tilted his rounded jelly crown toward the gray heavens.
BUUUUUUUUUURP!
The bone-shaking sonic wave that erupted from his fluid maw didn’t sound like thunder or the roar of a starving beast. It was an amazing, universe-clearing ancient void burp that rang across five leagues of open plain. The sound blast wave blew away snowdrifts five hundred paces around the ridge. It cleared the frozen granite down to its ancient stone bed.
And instead of sulfur or grave-rot, the warm breeze that rolled across the valley carried an intoxicatingly pleasant aroma of fresh ozone, caramelized chestnuts, and sweet toasted sesame oil.
Following the great burp, Lin Xiao’s body tightened back to its comfortable forty-inch sphere. He gave thirty polite, rhythmic coughs:
Ahem... Cough... Pop...
