The golden spear of star-fire dropped with forty tons of downward moving thrust.
Grand Inquisitor Chu Jue put his full Third-Revolution Golden Core weight behind the stroke, expecting the strike to turn to steam the crippled boy, shear through the bottom of the granite basin, and drive forty feet deeper into the mountain’s roots.
The spear never touched Lin Ke’s chest.
Three inches from the boy’s bare, scarred chest bone, the spear struck something flat, rigid, and total.
TONG.
The sound was not an explosion. It was the sharp, crystal-clear ring of a high-hum tuning fork made of pure-crystal diamond striking an unbending sound boundary.
The seventy-foot golden star-fire spear froze dead in mid-air.
Its forward driving force didn’t fade. It rebounded. A blast wave of pure golden fire blasted outward in a perfect thirty-degree cone, stripping the skin from the surrounding stone flags and vaporizing the leftover herbal water in the basin into dry ozone.
