Up on the stone balcony of the Black-Skull Swamp Palace, Duke Wu watched the last of his three thousand personal guards sit down by the roadside with a wooden bowl of braised King Centipede meat and shout, “Three cheers for Lord Pei!”
Duke Wu’s face twisted from pale white to dark purple, and then to ashen gray.
He was a Rank 4 Late (Qi Gathering Stage 8) warlord—the feared Poison-Swamp Duke who had ruled five counties and half a million people with an iron fist for thirty years! Yet in less than seventy-two hours, Pei Xuan hadn’t even fought a single traditional duel with him. Instead, Pei Xuan had fed his poison fog to giant mint frogs, zapped his mosquitoes with bamboo tennis rackets, boiled his centipede vanguard into spicy crawfish hotpot, paved a six-lane highway over his bottomless swamp, and pressure-cooked his 300-year-old guardian monster into lunch for his own defecting guards!
“You think you can put me in one of those ugly yellow vests like Guild Master Qian and Marquis Pei Zhan?!” Duke Wu snarled, his bloodshot eyes glaring down at Pei Xuan on the highway below.
With a trembling hand, Duke Wu reached inside his beetle-shell collar and pulled out a pitch-black, skull-stamped wax pill: the Rank 4 Seven-Step Heart-Melting Poison Pill!
