Down on the wet granite flagstones, Xiao Huo coughed up another mouthful of pink lemon-scented foam. His dantian felt like an empty stove that had been kicked down a flight of stairs.
Out of his right ear, a scorched, fist-sized wisp of gray soul-smoke wriggled free.
It was the remnant spirit of Poison-Elder Wu. Only thirty percent of his spiritual form remained intact after the Heavenly Script had tried to burn him as emergency fuel, and his ghostly white beard was singed down to black stubble.
“Damn the Script! Damn this freakish family!” the old ghost shrieked silently to himself, keeping his aura compressed as thin as a wet cobweb.
“That brat Xiao Huo is completely finished! If I stay inside his broken meridians for another ten seconds, that man on the porch will turn me into fertilizer!”
Peeking through the drifting pink bathwater steam, the cunning old wraith spotted eighty-year-old Grandmaster Pill-King Huo standing thirty paces away beside the stone lion statue.
Because Grandmaster Huo had just pulled out three strands of his own beard in shock, his mind-sea was wide open and unguarded.
“A Rank 6 Peak Pill-King with a healthy body and a royal treasury!” Poison-Elder Wu’s tiny ghost-eyes gleamed with desperate greed. “If I slip through the lemon steam, burrow into his forehead, and swallow his soul while he’s distracted, I can fake my death and walk out of this arena in the Pill-King’s skin!”
