The shattered leftovers of the five-hundred-foot soul-spear were still drifting down onto the gravel like gray, spent snow when Crown Prince Yan Wuji experienced something entirely alien to the royal bloodline of the Great Da-Qi.
Pure, pure, bowel-freezing terror.
Inside the four-hundred-foot titan’s black-iron skull, the Prince’s merged mind thrashed wildly against the bone lattice. His immortal pride, his demonic arrogance, his delusions of sky godhood—all of it had evaporated the instant that five-thousand-degree world-ending lance met Frank’s yellow spun-glass hard hat with a dull, hollow tonk.
In the ancient records of the Nether Realm, the Nether Sovereign Soul-Piercing Spear was said to have impaled ancient mountain dragons and shattered the defensive formations of the First Epoch’s Imperial Capital. It was a cosmic weapon forged from the suffering of one hundred thousand souls and the dense star-fire of a collapsing star.
And it had bounced off a yellow plastic bucket!
Yan Wuji looked down through the avatar’s eye sockets at the solitary figure standing in indigo denim bib overalls.
Frank wasn’t glowing with golden sky halos. He wasn’t brandishing a supreme immortal sword or reciting ancient Buddhist sutras. He was standing there in scuffed insulating work boots, resting a red pipe wrench across his shoulder, his face expressing nothing more than the mild, bored annoyance of a town landlord dealing with an overflowing toilet on a Friday afternoon.
