The sky above the Myriad Spirit Safe hall didn’t merely darken. It curdled.
Where sunlight had filtered through the spirit willow’s emerald leaves only moments before, an oily sheet of clotted crimson vapor rolled across the jagged mountain crests. The air grew thick with the stench of stale slaughterhouses and copper melted rock waste, heavy enough to coat the tongue with a metal grease.
Fifty yards from the safe hall’s stone castle walls, Lin Xiao sat on the open turf where his afternoon tea table had just vanished. His round, semi-clear azure body wobbled softly in the dying breeze, shimmering with clean sapphire light against the churned black loam. High above him, the cloud of blood-mists boiled like fat in a copper pan, churning with streaks of sickly violet lightning that hissed as they struck the upper air.
“Ants,” a voice hissed through the thunder, rattling the teeth in every defender’s jaw. “Mindless, mongrel vermin who grovel in the mud and pretend to build a kingdom.”
The crimson ceiling split. A dropping platform of condensed blood-water parted the smoke, carrying Elder Han Gu toward the earth.
The elder no longer looked entirely human. His skeletal frame was draped in robes sewn from the cured skin of rival sect students, the hems stiff with hundreds of years of dried blood gore. Sunken black eyes burned within hollow sockets like embers buried in peat, his yellowed incisors bared in an unbroken sneer of rabid disgust. In his withered right fist, the dragon-bone staff thrummed with a wet, gurgling pulse, feeding directly into the five-hundred-foot bronze behemoth that drifted behind him like a headsman’s block.
For three hundred years, Han Gu had walked the eastern continent as a living plague. He had slaughtered entire mortal lineages to refine single drops of marrow essence, burned mountain academies to seize ancient bronze scriptures, and ground three ages of beast clans into pill sludge. In the hierarchy of the Blood Sea Demonic Sect, he was known as the Soul-Flayer of the Southern Marches. To him, the world consisted of two categories. The hunting beasts who harvested life, and the cattle waiting to be drained.
Now, as Han Gu dropped to hovering height three hundred feet above the clearing, his Nascent Soul sea of mind uncoiled with unrestrained malice.
It wasn’t a spiritual aura meant for dueling. It was a domain forged specifically to grind mortal marrow into powder. The gravity pressure dropped like a falling slab of solid granite, hitting the clearing with a dull, heavy, shaking thud that cracked the bedrock beneath the soil.
On the castle walls, Tie Shan dropped to one knee with a sharp grunt. His star-iron prosthetic arm struck the low roof wall, the stone groaning beneath his weight as his braided beard brushed the castle walls. Around him, thirty earth-bear warriors lowered their ten-thousand-jin iron-hard metal tower shields. They locked their bronze rims into the low roof wall grooves to form an unbroken metal wall against the downward crush.
“Hold the wards!” Tie Shan roared through gritted teeth. It slammed his five-hundred-jin forging hammer flat against the flat stone slabs to channel the earth leyline into the wall’s footing. “Don’t let the little ones look directly at that monster’s staff! Bear clan, brace your shoulders!”
Beside him, Su Ling’er drew her three snowy tails tight around two shivering badger cubs. Her jade hairpins shook as her spiritual spirit veins strained against the choking red gravity. She whispered gentle words of comfort, channeling her soft fox-fire aura to form a protective heat bubble over the young ones.
“Master Lin is down there,” Su Ling’er whispered, her amber eyes fixed upon the lone blue sphere in the center of the kill-zone. “Don’t fear the old monster’s noise. The sky has fallen before, and Master always turns it into something sweet.”
Down in the holding pens behind the main barracks, the captured demonic scouts pressed their foreheads into the dirt. They wept in pure terror. They knew better than anyone what Elder Han Gu did to survivors of failed expeditions. If the elder triumphed, their bones would be scraped clean and tossed into the cooking pot as fuel for the nine ghosts.
High above the valley rim, hidden within the thunderheads, Xiao Long coiled his thirty-meter snake-like form. The horned river serpent’s sapphire scales gleamed with frost as he wove moisture barriers to prevent the toxic foul fog from touching the freshwater springs feeding the safe hall’s drinking wells. His long whiskers twitched with restrained fury, awaiting his father’s signal to flood the sky.
Yet in the very center of the kill-zone. There, the gravity force exceeded one hundred and forty thousand kilopascals, Lin Xiao merely sank half an inch into the soft loam.
His non-Newtonian jelly-like mass absorbed the downward crushing force with the easy stretch of a feather mattress. The sheer moving weight that threatened to fracture Tie Shan’s titan bones simply rippled across Lin Xiao’s azure membrane in mesmerizing circular waves, vanishing harmlessly into his void dantian.
Lin Xiao tilted his ball-shaped crown upward, studying the skeletal old man with genuine confusion.
“He really has terrible stance,” Lin Xiao noted silently to his friend within his sea of mind. “Hunching like that for three hundred years must do terrible things to the lower spine. And that coat is fully unhygienic. Imagine trying to wash dried blood out of leather without ruining the stitches. You’d never get the smell out, no matter how much lavender water you boiled.”
“Host’s ergonomic and sartorial critique is noted and medically sound,” the Dao Spirit responded in her calm, melodic voice. “However, caution is advised regarding sky fine dust levels. The target’s sanguine domain is currently evaporating wild mountain vegetation along the lower ridges. He turned organic plant fiber into rotting combustible gas. Plus, the spiritual thickness of the five-hundred-foot vessel overhead is climbing rapidly as the nine ghost-eyes absorb the elder’s blood.”
Lin Xiao nudged his sense nodes forward, tasting the mountain wind. The sweet, crisp scent of wild mint and mountain pine that normally filled the valley had been replaced by a rancid, rotten-egg reek. Down on the agricultural slopes, the broad leaves of his autumn turnip patches were beginning to curl and blacken at the edges under the dropping red smog.
That was entirely unacceptable.
Those turnips had been planted by the bear cubs three months ago. They were supposed to be harvested next week for the great communal autumn braise, stewed with wild ginger, dried river mushrooms, and tender chunks of mountain yam. Ruining an entire field of sweet root vegetables over an old man’s temper tantrum was an unforgivable crime against agriculture.
“You took away the tea table,” Han Gu sneered. His voice dropped into a deep-throated rasp that scraped across the clearing like gravel. He drifted ten paces lower, his skeletal knuckles whitening around the dragon-bone staff. “You think you can play tricks before a Nascent Soul ancestor, you pathetic puddle of water? You think because you swallowed a few scouting magic charms and tricked my hounds with river tricks, you have the right to look upon me as an equal?”
Lin Xiao bounced once, settling back into his comfortable melon shape. His telepathic voice rang across the clearing, clear, light. Then he entirely undisturbed by the roaring thunder overhead.
“I didn’t take away the table to insult you, Elder Han,” Lin Xiao replied mildly. “I put the wine away because your blood-clouds are shedding soot everywhere. Good peach wine needs clean air to breathe. Or the fruit notes turn sour on the tongue. If you’re going to keep coughing up that black smoke, we really can’t share a drink in good conscience. A vintage like that deserves respect, not soot.”
Han Gu’s left eye twitched with such violent intensity that the parchment-like skin beneath his brow tore slightly, oozing a drop of dark crimson ichor.
“Impudent parasite!” Han Gu screamed, his voice cracking into a shrill shriek that caused several captured demonic students in the rear pens to clamp their hands over their bleeding ears. “You dare lecture me on wine?! I’m Elder Han Gu! I have put out forty mortal bloodlines! The bones of my enemies pave the grand stairs of the Blood Sea Hall! Emperors have bowed their crowned heads in the dust before my shadow, offering their daughters as tribute to avoid my cooking pot!”
He threw back his head, laughing with a jagged, frantic rhythm that set the loose rocks on the surrounding cliffs tumbling down the slopes.
“You speak of turnips and peach wine before a master of the ancient arts?” Han Gu hissed, leaning forward over his platform until his rotting breath drifted down into the grass. “Look upon this vessel, you shapeless slug! The Nine-Ghost Blood Soul Cauldron was forged during the War of the Seven Heavens. It has burned up three righteous sects and drunk the ancient blood of a nine-tailed fox queen! Its belly holds the weeping torment of one hundred thousand souls, each one cursing the light of the sun!”
He raised his staff high. He pointed the weeping dragon skull straight at the five-hundred-foot bronze behemoth hovering behind him.
“You wanted to see my cooking pot?!” Han Gu’s skeletal chest heaved as he pumped eighty percent of his Nascent Soul training into the vessel’s main starting runes. “I’ll let you see it! I’ll melt your liquid core into melted rock waste, peel every scale from your serpent, and turn this valley into a sea of burning marrow! When I’m finished, there won’t be a single sprout of green left upon this earth, only an ocean of red glass!”
The sky shuddered as the nine bronze dragon-heads around the cooking pot’s upper rim began to glow with blazing bright green soul-flame. The ancient metal, forged from ancient star-bronze and hardened in the tears of a hundred thousand sacrifices, shook with a low, ancient hum that made the distant river water churn into white froth.
Down on the turf, Lin Xiao didn’t flinch. He simply widened his azure body slightly. He anchored himself against the rising gale, his sapphire eyes glowing with quiet, unbending focus.
“Well,” Lin Xiao murmured into the howling wind. He watched the green flames lick the edges of the bronze rim. “If you won’t use that kettle for soup, I suppose I’ll just have to wash the pot myself. And when I’m done cleaning it, you’re going to apologize to those turnips.”