The courtyard remained frozen in stunned silence, the courier’s ragged sobbing the only sound in the dark.
Patriarch Shen stood over the withered boy, his massive fists shaking with helpless rage. Beside him, Sect Mistress Yue reached out with a trembling hand, gently smoothing the white hair from the courier’s forehead.
Underneath his black silk blindfold, Kaelen took a slow, measured breath.
Ten years of lifespan every hour, he thought, feeling the faint, greasy vibration humming through the courtyard flagstones. Vaelen isn’t collecting taxes. He is turning thirty provinces into a butcher shop.
Before anyone in the garden could speak, a strange, metallic hum drifted from the southern riverbank.
The sound began as a low buzz, like a swarm of hornets trapped in a bronze kettle. Then it rose in pitch, vibrating through the teeth and cheekbones of every cultivator in Seven-Tower City.
Above the burning docks, two miles to the south, a golden light climbed into the smoke-choked sky.
A massive bronze disk, twenty paces wide and carved with concentric dragon rings, hovered three hundred feet above the river current. Atop the platform stood a tall, skeletal man in scarlet censorate robes. His skin was pale as tallow, his beard braided with gold wire, and his eyes burned with the cold arrogance of a Nascent Soul Late master.
