The four Grand Ancestors lay buried up to their chins in the clipped clover of the school sports field, their four matching red goose-egg bumps still whistling with faint wisps of white steam.
Without their four-hundred-year-old ivory and wooden dentures—which eight-year-old Su Nuannuan had politely swept into a small dustpan using a leaf—their hollow cheeks collapsed inward like four wrinkled dried plums. Every time they breathed out, their lips flapped with a soft, pathetic pffft-pffft sound.
Grand Ancestor Jian Chen strained his neck, pushing his chin half an inch out of the damp soil as he let out a dry, rattling wheeze.
“Kill uth, Gu Changsheng,” Jian Chen lisped hoarsely, his sunken gray eyes dull with total defeat and fatalistic despair. “Go ahead and strike our crowns with your spatula. You broke our four-pole array.
You let your four little monsters tenderize our old bones and knock our teeth out. But your victory is hollow!”
Beside him, Grand Ancestor Poison-Core coughed up a mouthful of sour gray phlegm, his purple skin turning the ashen color of wet fireplace soot.
“Our lifethpan candles are already burned to the wax,” Poison-Core wheezed, a bitter smirk tugging at his toothless mouth. “To cast that Four-Pole Tribulation Array and the Six-Sided Blood Coffin, we burned the last reserves of our bone-marrow longevity! Four centuries of sleeping in cold stone coffins have rotted our five viscera and six bowels to black mush.
