Deep beneath the ruined front plaza of the Golden-Vault Immortal Sect, a pair of hundred-foot bronze doors covered in eighteen layers of soul-eating curses stood guarding the sect’s Ten-Thousand-Year Ancestral Treasury.
Normally, anyone who touched those bronze doors without Patriarch Jin’s blood token would have their hands melted off by black curse-fire.
Today, however, Hong Ling didn’t even bother asking Patriarch Jin for his blood token.
She simply marched down the stone steps at the head of three thousand Dry-Well accounting clerks, pulled a fused [Municipal Tax-Audit Master Crowbar] from her belt, jammed it into the crack of the bronze doors, and gave it one solid yank!
CRACK—SCREEEEECH!
All eighteen layers of fifty-thousand-year-old soul curses shattered like cheap glass when they met the golden civic authority of Dry-Well Village, and the hundred-foot bronze doors swung wide open!
At the exact same moment, across the other 107 sect headquarters linked by Pei Xuan’s wormhole network, one hundred and seven identical audit teams pried open the underground vaults of the entire Anti-Tax Coalition.
When the station floodlights switched on inside the Golden-Vault Treasury, even Pei Xuan, Abacus Su, and Sun Baolu (“Boom-Pot Sun”)—who had walked down the stairs behind Hong Ling—stopped and stared.
