The air above the Grand Central Tiered hall didn’t simply heat up. It ignited into a high-pressure vortex of golden solar star-fire.
Grand Elder Yan Gu, suspended thirty feet in the air upon a fractured golden cloud, channeled the full might of his Tier 8 Saint Domain into a single execution technique: the Nine-Sages Mountain-Cleaving Strike. A roaring blade of condensed solar energy, forty feet wide and burning at eight thousand degrees, screamed through the air straight toward Frank’s back. The dragon-bone marble plaza cracked beneath the sheer downward heat wave. Scholars on the first three tiers threw themselves to the ground, shielding their faces as the blasting heat blistered the paint on the surrounding pavilions and boiled the water out of the decorative lotus ponds.
For four hundred years, the Gu Clan had reigned as the unchallenged academic arbiters of the Jiuzhou Continent. To have their old family scriptures labeled as unmaintained legacy drafts and their sacred monuments treated like broken kitchen plumbing by a carpenter in denim overalls was an indignity that could only be cleansed in sovereign blood.
“Desist, lunatic!” Yan Gu’s voice shook the heavens with world-ending fury. “You have mocked our lineage! You have soiled our tablets! Now, die under the judgment of the Nine Sages! Let your ashes scatter to the four winds!”
