Zhu Heling had ceased to look like a scholar.
As he stepped across the threshold of Entry hall 530, the blue-white glare of the portable arc-lamps lit up a figure that seemed to have clawed its way out of a potion-made fire. His elegant ivory robes were gone, replaced by a said clearlyharness of black iron plates bolted directly through the leather of his under-tunic. Across his breastplate, wired into copper channels that hissed with leaking ozone, were three shattered fragments of glowing sapphire dao-cores—stolen from the statues of the Masters of the Sluice.
The stolen spiritual marrow did not flow peacefully through his spirit veins.
His veins bulged against the skin of his neck and temples in thick, purple cords, pulsing with a wild, irregular rhythm that forced his breath out in harsh, wheezing gasps. His left eye was fully blind, clouded over with a milky white clouded eye caused by the sound blast wave in the Stone porch. His right eye burned with a bright, terrifying crimson fire, its pupil dilated to the rim.
In his right hand he carried his golden scribe’s measuring tongs, its needle-tips now fitted with hollow potion-made injectors. In his left, he held a repeating acid-lance connected by a flexible copper-mesh tube to a high-pressure tank mounted upon his spine.
