The sunlight outside the Hall of Ten Thousand Sages didn’t bring warmth to the reactionary elders. It brought the cold, blinding glare of total ideological ruin.
Grand Elder Yan Gu scrambled to his feet on the shattered terrace, his hands clawing at his chest as if trying to tear out his own golden dantian. His eyes were bloodshot, his face mottled with purple veins. His teeth rattled together like dry dice in an iron cup.
“Soul puppetry!” Yan Gu shrieked, his voice climbing into a ragged screech that pierced the mountain peaks. “He used Nether-Void Soul Puppetry! It’s the only explanation!”
High Scribe Checker Mo Sha scrambled up beside him. He grabbed his melted iron scroll-tube like an improvised club, his sharkskin robes smoldering with acrid smoke. “Yes! Demonology!” Mo Sha bellowed, spraying dark, ink-tinged spit across the flat stone slabs. “He’s an infiltrator from the Heretical Scribes! He brought vile, forbidden soul-binding needles into the holy sanctum! He desecrated the spirit-vessels of our ancestors, turning them into marionettes to mock the sacred Gu lineage!”
Elder Mo Cheng, his bald head still blistered and blackened from the earlier lightning backfeed, hobbled forward on a borrowed wooden crutch. He waved his scorched fists at the sky. “Arrest them all!” Mo Cheng howled, tears of humiliated rage cutting clean white tracks through the soot on his cheeks. “No human mortal can command ten thousand First Epoch Master Teachers to bend their spines! He has enslaved the souls of the dead! Slay the…
