Yan Tiexin began to laugh.
It was a wet, ragged sound, shaking his starved frame as dark blood trickled through his clenched teeth.
“You think... You think you have won?” Yan whispered, his eyes wide and vacant, swimming with the manic hysteria of a ruined man. “You think you can humiliate the Great Yan Dynasty and walk away to tend your cabbage patch?”
He raised his left hand.
Cradled in his bleeding palm was the master metal tube of the Imperial Nine-Rounds Soul-Leash Scroll. The bone casing was cracked. But the crimson heart inside was beating with a wild, lethal rhythm of two hundred beats per minute.
“If the Emperor can’t own your souls,” Yan snarled, his voice rising into a shrill shriek, “then no one will!”
Yan bit down savagely on his own tongue.
He spat a thick, steaming mouthful of Golden Core essence-blood directly onto the bone metal tube.
