Nine hundred feet above the sleeping palace roofs, the wind whipping across the ninth-floor observatory of the Imperial Astral Tower howled like a pack of starving wolves.
At the center of the open-air black marble platform stood a circular bronze astrolabe table engraved with forbidden blood-refining runes. Suspended six inches above the center of the table was a fist-sized, twelve-faceted diamond of pure celestial ice—the Thousand-Year Frost-Star Crystal stolen from the Royal Academy Vault.
Deep inside the translucent heart of that crystal, a tiny, fingernail-sized wisp of silver-white phoenix light—a dormant soul-beacon left behind in the mortal world six years ago by Empress Luo Qingxue—shivered violently. Dark crimson blood-fire crept up the sides of the stone. Trying to brand a slave-seal across its wings!
Standing over the altar with his golden-crowned hair whipping in the gale, Second Prince Qian Ye [Regressor Halo: 52%] gripped a jagged Rank 4 Mid Blood-Flame Sacrificial Dagger in both hands. Flanking him to the left and right stood two tall. Skeletal figures wrapped from head to toe in dark gray burial shrouds—the Twin Rank 4 Mid Shadow Protectors of the Royal Ancestral Shrine (Qi Gathering Stage 6).
Whom Qian Ye had paid half of his remaining secret treasury to summon for this single night.
