Down on the floating slab of scrap brass inside the Central Mega-Sun’s core cavern, Headmaster Hong slowly raised his head.
Through the open audio return of his broadcast console, the roaring, gut-busting laughter of two trillion mortals and cultivators echoed through the chamber. That chorus across all one thousand solar systems hit him like a physical slap across his face.
For five thousand years, he had been the apex predator of Sector 7. Whenever his white robes appeared on the sky-screens, planets had trembled and emperors had dropped to their knees. Yet today, two trillion “ants”
were pointing at his smoking trousers, laughing until they cried, and recording his duck-yelp as a morning wake-up ringtone!
The sheer, suffocating humiliation burned away the very last thread of the Script-King Clone’s sanity.
His long white hair whipped around his shoulders like maddened snakes. His bloodshot eyes turned completely pitch-black, leaking oily streams of corrosive Upper-Realm Script Ink down his wrinkled cheeks.
“You laugh at me...?”
Headmaster Hong’s voice had lost all human inflection. It scraped across the underground cavern like rusty iron nails dragging across a slate chalkboard.
