Solon’s golden avatar turned and fled.
All pretense of celestial majesty had evaporated. The tyrant’s golden form scrambled across the floating basalt platform on all fours, his cracked bronze limbs clawing frantically toward the eighty-yard Origin-Iron Door.
His celestial halos were dead. His solar robes hung in tattered, scorched ribbons.
In his three thousand years of imperial reign, Sovereign Solon had never experienced genuine terror. He had butchered sect patriarchs. He had crushed whole dynasties beneath his planetary pestle.
Yet moments ago, a southern border slacker in straw slippers had refined two and a half million Sovereign Jade Cores in front of his eyes.
The slacker had swallowed that ocean of energy without blinking, advancing straight into Sovereign Dao Late while yawning behind his sleeve.
“Open the lock!” Solon shrieked toward the seam of the door, his voice breaking into frantic static. “Disengage the outer wards! Open the sanctuary!”
Three hundred massive astral bolts along the edges of the Origin-Iron Door began to groan, turning in their heavy bronze sockets to welcome the avatar home.
