The black glass lid didn’t slide open. It blew up.
An ear-splitting blast wave hurled three tons of fiery stone shrapnel across the trench line. Jagged black shards whistled through the freezing mist like grapeshot, chewing through sandbags and severing heavy pine support beams with wet, splintering cracks.
Lin Ke was still on his knees in the mud, Apothecary He’s splint biting into his cracked left forearm. Just then, the shadow fell over them.
It stood nine feet tall, assembled from bleached rib bones, green rust-crusted bronze armor plates, and matted black shroud cloth that reeked of three hundred years of underground rot. In its gauntleted right fist swung an eight-foot hooked bone-scythe. Its jagged edge wept an oily, pitch-black liquid that hissed as it dripped onto the stone.
Stygian Soul-Severing Bile.
The chemical signed name was clear. An ultra-packed rotting hydrolytic enzyme compounded with negative-heat Yin spirit-acid. It possessed a pH lower than one, capable of digesting organic connective tissue and melting glassy waveguides into slurry in less than fifteen seconds.
Meng Shan was already moving, his massive frame lunging forward with a deep-throated roar. But the distance was twenty paces and the creature possessed the explosive first gaining speed of a tightly packed spring.
