Crown Prince Yan Wuji sat in the crushed gravel, listening to five hundred thousand voices laughing at him.
It wasn’t the respectful awe he had known since the day of his birth in the Golden Dragon Palace. It wasn’t the fearful whispers of tributary monarchs bowing low before the royal throne. It was the loud, raw, derisive mockery of market merchants, peasant farmers, blacksmith apprentices, and wandering rogue fighters pointing down from the high tiers of the Grand Coliseum.
He looked down at his own trembling, soot-caked hands. He looked at his torn pink silk undergarments, flapping pathetically in the afternoon breeze. He looked at the steaming yellow puddle soaking into the sand beneath his thighs.
His thousand-year royal pride—the sacred, untouchable bloodline of the Great Da-Qi founding dynasty—had been dragged through the town dirt and stamped with an CIE-404 fine ticket.
Something deep inside the Prince’s high-born skull snapped with the crisp, dry sound of kindling under a boot.
His bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets. Thick purple foam bubbled from the corners of his mouth.
“Insects... All of you’re insects...” Yan Wuji hissed, his voice rising from a broken, deep-throated wheeze into a manic, psychotic shriek that echoed off the dark rock bleachers. “You dare laugh at the True Dragon of the Jiuzhou Plane?! You dare look upon my sacred disgrace?!”
