The cheerful ding-a-ling of Gu Changsheng’s brass hen egg timer faded gently across the polished wooden floor of the Floor Eight coliseum.
Where the ten-thousand-foot, eighty-eight-armed Omni-Protagonist Amalgamation Monster had stood less than a minute ago, two completely different sights now occupied the top and bottom of the arena.
High up near the vaulted ceiling of Floor Eight floated a breathtaking, ten-mile-wide nebula of pure, warm golden light.
It was the combined essence of one hundred thousand purified fortunes, ancestral spirit veins, stolen martial inspirations. Confiscated family luck that the Chief Author’s “Chosen Ones” had plundered across three million years and eight books. Washed clean of every trace of black ink and protagonist greed by the five Gu children’s laundry soap, peppermint spray, bamboo ruler, digestion furnace, toilet array.
Cast-iron frying pan, the golden cloud hummed like a choir of a hundred thousand homesick birds waiting to fly back to their rightful nests.
And down on the wooden floorboards at the center of the arena sat a tiny, bruised, walnut-sized lump of squirming black-ink dough with eight miniature heads the size of green peas. Lin Fan, Chu Tian, Qian Ye, Xue Sha, Gu Wuji, and the three composite cliché heads—all squeaking in tiny, high-pitched voices like mosquitoes trapped under a teacup:
