The summit crater of Hellfire Volcano roared like an open blacksmith’s furnace.
Fifty fathoms below the jagged basalt rim, a lake of boiling orange magma churned and bubbled, spitting sulfurous smoke and red-hot cinders into the dark pre-dawn sky. Jagged crimson lightning danced across the low thunderclouds overhead, illuminating the barren black crags in stark flashes.
Right at the edge of the central basalt overhang stood the [Illusion Execution Guillotine].
Expanded from its miniature form into a thirty-foot-tall Upper-Realm execution scaffold forged from black bone-iron, the guillotine radiated a heavy, suffocating aura of despair. A five-hundred-pound diagonal blade of blood-stained astral steel hung suspended at the top of the frame, connected to a heavy iron release lever on the right side.
Around the base of the scaffold, Envoy Xue Sha had spent the last four hours of the night painting an intricate Soul-Trauma Amplification Array using his own coughed-up blood. Designed to magnify an eleven-year-old boy’s grief tenfold the moment he stepped onto the crater plateau.
Locked into the wooden neck-stock beneath the hanging blade was the figure in blue-and-white striped pajamas.
Because Xue Sha was terrified that “Gu Changsheng” might wake up and pull a golden spatula out of his pocket. He had wrapped thirty-six layers of heavy black-iron chains around the dummy’s torso and pulled a black cloth hood halfway down to its nose. Leaving only the striped pajama collar, the hidden broadcast lens, and a faint wisp of warm sweet-potato steam visible.
