The eighteen patent guards didn’t wait for the smoke to clear.
Seeing their commander’s peak technique absorbed without a single casualty, the guards formed a defensive crescent. They drew eighteen flying swords forged from sky cobalt. The blades hovered above their shoulders, humming with high-hum cutting edges.
“Timed together strike!” the lead guard barked, his burned face twisting with desperation. “Decapitate the shield-bearers!”
Eighteen swords tilted downward, locking onto Meng Shan’s blistered shoulders.
“Shen Yue,” Lin Ke’s voice rang through the brass intercom pipe. “Flush the queue.”
High on the mezzanine, Shen Yue didn’t take a single step forward.
She stood before three massive wooden drying racks, each holding one hundred pre-inscribed spirit magic charms linked together with thin copper wire ribbons. The drying racks were built of kiln-dried pine soaked in non-current-carrying animal fat, supporting fifty parallel bus lines etched in refined red copper.
The ward’s lead shielding had fully grounded external spiritual frequencies. Because of that, Shen Yue was not casting through the surrounding air. She was driving low-voltage trigger currents through hardwired physical circuits. She closed thirty contact relays per second.
