Gu Changsheng reached behind his yellow bunny apron and untied the leather loop of his kitchen tool belt.
He drew out his standard Cast-Iron Wok Spatula. The blade was eighteen inches of black, well-seasoned iron, marked with tiny dents from years of scraping crispy rice crusts off the bottom of heavy cast-iron woks. It was a reliable, honest household tool.
Over the past four years, it had flipped ten thousand scallion pancakes, stirred five thousand pots of soup, and bonked dozens of arrogant villains squarely on the bridge of the nose.
However, now that Gu Changsheng stood at the supreme pinnacle of Rank 8 Peak as a Solar Furnace Sovereign, the scale of the battlefield had changed. Facing a five-thousand-year-old clone forged from Immortal Script-Parchment, an eighteen-inch spatula felt a little too small for the job.
Across the cavern, on the floating slab of scrap brass, Headmaster Hong’s seventy-two cracked obsidian ribs were already beginning to knit themselves back together!
Thin, squirming threads of black Upper-Realm Script Ink seeped out of his bone marrow, stitching his fractured parchment-skeleton back together like surgical thread. Even though eighty-five percent of his combat cultivation had collapsed from the backlash of his failed Three-Sun Demon Palm, his clone body was not made of ordinary mortal flesh.
