The ancient star-bronze vessel didn’t merely wake up. It screamed.
Around the huge five-hundred-foot rim of the Nine-Ghost Blood Soul Cauldron, nine sculpted dragon-heads wrenched themselves free from the stone-hard metal casing. Their jaws unhinged with a grinding groan that echoed across twenty miles of mountain ridges, releasing waterfalls of black, boiling fluid that fell toward the earth like greasy rain. Hollow eye sockets that had slept in cold darkness for three hundred years blazed to life with emerald soul-fire. He cast an eerie, eerie-glowing glare across the entire mountain basin.
For over eighty years, Elder Han Gu had scoured the lonely mass graves of the southern continents to assemble this monstrosity. He had melted ancient battle-standards, unsealed forgotten tombs of ancient war-chiefs. Then he fed the blood of forty slaughtered villages into the smelting hearths. The cooking pot was his masterpiece, his magnum opus of carnage. A Grade 4 apex disaster vessel engineered to grind the living into liquid spirit elixir and forge a path to the mid-Nascent Soul realm.
High atop his blood platform, Han Gu gouged his own withered left forearm with his dragon-bone staff. A thick, sluggish ribbon of black Nascent Soul essence poured from the wound, drawn upward by the cooking pot’s starving gravity pull.
“Wake up, GHOSTS OF THE NINE SANGUINE ABYSSES!” Han Gu shrieked, his skeletal face twisted in thrilled mania. “Drink the blood of your master! Devour the sky, swallow the soil, and tear the soul from every beast that dares breathe beneath the sun!”
The boiling lake of marrow within the vessel surged.
With a roar that shook the pine trees down to their taproots, nine titanic specters erupted from the mouth of the cooking pot. Each entity towered more than two hundred feet in height, their chimeric forms woven from condensed rotting yin-fire, shattered ribcages, and writhing ribbons of flayed muscle. Tens of thousands of weeping human faces bubbled to the surface of their smoky hides. Their mouths opening and closed in an unending, harmonized wail of unbearable agony.
The heat across the clearing plummeted forty degrees in a single heartbeat. But the air burned. It was the inverse burning of acid-burning yin-flame. That cold fire withered living mountain shrubs into brittle gray salt without leaving embers.
On the castle walls of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall, the defensive wards flared brilliant gold, then began to hiss and peel away like wet rice paper.
“Formation, lock shields!” Tie Shan’s thunderous roar cut through the wailing specters. The titan smith threw his entire seven-foot frame against the castle walls, his star-iron right arm blazing with runic friction as he anchored the main ward-line. Thirty bear warriors behind him pressed their shoulders into the linked brackets. Their breath turned to white frost against their bronze breastplates. “Stand your ground! We hold the gate for the cubs!”
Beside the bear formation, Xiao Hei stepped onto the highest low roof wall stone. The wolf king didn’t cower. His ten-foot black glass body bristled with lunar power, silver star-pattern runes igniting along his ribs like blazing torches. A deep, sub-sonic growl rolled from his throat, sending ripples of lunar gravity across the courtyard to steady the shivering fox maidens, the frightened badger apprentices. Elder Lu Da’s rescued river otters huddling near the granaries.
Down in the lower barracks, Elder Lu Da gripped his driftwood staff with trembling, webbed paws. He pulled three small otter pups close against his rainbow-bright silver coat, shielding their eyes from the sickly green glare.
“Grandfather,” one pup whimpered, clutching Elder Lu Da’s whisker. “Is the sky coming to eat us?”
“No, little one,” Elder Lu Da rasped, his eyes shining with desperate faith as he looked out across the valley. “The sky is loud, but our Master is beneath it. Look at the meadow. The blue Lord hasn’t taken a single step back.”
Su Ling’er stood at the edge of the watchtower, her three snowy tails fully unfurled against the howling wind. Delicate crimson ribbons of spirit silk danced between her slender fingers, weaving a backup purification array to protect the storehouses and the nursery barracks from falling soul-cinders. Her amber eyes remained fixed on the lone sapphire orb resting in the churned mud below.
“He isn’t running,” Su Ling’er said softly, her voice steady despite the freezing wind tearing at her vermilion robes. “Look at him. He isn’t afraid at all. He has that look he gets right before he turns an angry beast into a friend or finds a new recipe.”
Down on the valley floor, Lin Xiao sat squarely beneath the dropping shadow of the nine giant statues.
To an outside observer, the scene was a total nightmare of demonic slaughter. Nine two-hundred-foot monstrosities made of packed death were diving straight toward a two-foot-wide blue puddle of water, their skeletal claws extended to rend the very earth into pieces. Acid-burning yin-fire trailed behind them in emerald waterfalls, splashing against the granite outcrops and dissolving boulders into frothing puddles of green melted rock waste.
To Lin Xiao, however, the situation presented a rather different problem.
“Good grief, the decibel level on those things is fully unreasonable,” Lin Xiao grumbled mentally, his azure mass shaking with irritation. “It’s like someone left nine rusty foghorns running inside an echoing bathroom. How can anyone think with all that screeching? And the draft they’re kicking up is going to scatter all my dry firewood.”
“Heat profile confirmed at three thousand five hundred degrees of inverted yin-burning,” the Dao Spirit stated in her calm, steady beat. “Spectral composition consists of about one hundred thousand fractured souls bound by ancient demonic blood-runes. The entity matrix is inherently unstable, sustained entirely by the target’s nonstop infusion of Nascent Soul essence.”
“So they’re basically suffering from extreme indigestion,” Lin Xiao deduced, observing how the faces on the specters twisted in torment rather than true malice. “Those poor souls don’t want to burn down my turnip patch. That dried-up old maniac has been keeping them locked in that rusty kettle for hundreds of years, poking them with bone needles to make them angry. Imagine being trapped in a dark metal pot with ninety-nine thousand screaming roommates for three hundred years. Anyone would lose their temper.”
“Your check is functionally accurate, Host,” the Dao Spirit replied. “The souls are experiencing nonstop neural and spiritual agony. Neutralizing the binding runes will need direct internal access to the cooking pot’s main refinement chamber.”
“Direct access, huh?” Lin Xiao murmured, watching the leading giant statue go down like an avalanche of rotting fire. “That sounds like an invitation to jump into the pot. Let’s see how well that old kettle handles a proper deep-cleaning.”
High above, Han Gu saw the blue slime flattening itself against the dirt. A triumphant, vicious cackle ripped from the elder’s cracked throat, spraying flecks of black bile into the blood-clouds.
“Look at it! The pathetic slug cowers before the wrath of the Nine Ghosts!” Han Gu screamed, pointing his dragon-bone staff straight downward with trembling glee. “Tear it apart! Drink every drop of its water essence! Let its memory be wiped from the mountains! When this valley is ash, this ancestor will refine every leftover beast into blood pills!”
The lead specter—a nightmare creature with the skull of a horned draconic fiend and a torso woven from thousands of weeping human arms—plunged downward with an ear-splitting sonic howl. The air in front of its dive ignited into an emerald cone of yin-flame. It traveled straight toward the sapphire orb.
Fifty feet.
Thirty feet.
Ten feet.
Lin Xiao didn’t try to dodge. He didn’t build a stone dome, nor did he deploy an evasive magic charm. Instead, he released the internal pressure locks holding his jelly-like mass in ball-shaped balance.
His entire body tightly packed downward like a heavy-duty coil spring. From a two-foot sphere, he collapsed into an ultra-dense, paper-thin disc of sapphire jelly barely three inches thick, pressed flush against the black solid mountain stone. The non-Newtonian fluid dynamics within his core sped up into hyper-rotation. It locked every cellular bond into an iron-hard dilatant impact-hardening matrix.
The massive emerald claw of the first ghost giant statue struck.
THWUMMMMMM!
The impact sounded not like a blade cutting flesh, but like a huge iron bell ringing deep beneath a frozen lake. The sheer blasting blast wave blew a ring of crushed dirt and shattered rock forty paces in every direction, gouging deep trenches into the earth.
Yet the blue disc didn’t break. It didn’t tear. It didn’t bleed.
The three thousand five hundred degrees of acid-burning yin-flame washed harmlessly over Lin Xiao’s slick, semi-clear membrane. The heat energy was instantly swallowed by his void dantian, siphoned off into the cooling chambers like cold springwater poured over hot stones. And the crushing downward force of the two-hundred-foot specter merely pushed the coiled spring to its total exact limit of squeezing.
“Squeezing ratio reached ninety-nine point four percent,” the Dao Spirit announced coolly in his mind. “Moving recoil fully charged. Flight path locked onto cooking pot intake vector.”
“Perfect,” Lin Xiao thought, a distinct sense of mischievous glee bubbling through his condensed core. “Tell that old man that lunch is served.”
The paper-thin blue disc suddenly snapped back into three dimensions.
The bedrock beneath the clearing didn’t merely crack. It exploded outward in a blinding burst of white dust as Lin Xiao released the stored striking force of the giant statue’s own strike.
With an ear-splitting sonic boom that shattered the dropping emerald flames into harmless green sparks, the sapphire projectile blasted straight upward into the sky.