Beneath the porcelain saucer of Pei Xuan’s teacup, there was a ring of shadow no wider than a fingernail.
Even with 100,000 Mini-Sun Highway Streetlights blazing down from both guardrails at forty-five-degree angles, the flat bottom rim of the white porcelain saucer still pressed against the wooden tabletop, keeping a paper-thin circle of darkness trapped underneath.
And compressed inside that half-inch circle of darkness was a whole Rank 8 Early Star-Lord!
Phantom-Blade Ghost King—ruler of the Five Shadow Worlds (Planets Thirty-Six to Forty) and the most feared assassin in the Broken Star Belt—was currently folded up smaller than a squashed cockroach underneath Pei Xuan’s saucer.
Through his Rank 8 Void-Shadow Fold Art, Ghost King had shrunk his skeletal body into a two-dimensional black silhouette, holding his breath so hard that his eyeballs bulged in the dark.
Ten minutes earlier, when he had watched through his shadow-mirror as all three thousand of his elite Shadow-Wraith Assassins got flashed by speed-cameras, bagged in golden nets for jaywalking, and dressed in yellow vests over their black tights, Ghost King had nearly coughed up three pints of black blood in rage!
“Three thousand shadow masters arrested by lampposts!” Ghost King seethed silently inside the tiny shadow under the saucer. “If word of this spreads to the Third Star-Lord, Blood-Moon Monarch will laugh at me for the next ten thousand years! I have to kill this Pei Xuan myself right now! Once the mayor is dead, his streetlights will go dark and my shadow empire…
