The stone stand of Monolith #001 was cold enough to freeze blood on contact.
Lin Ke approached the white marble platform. Then, the air three feet from the stone formed tiny ice needles that stung his cheeks like thrown gravel. The white stone stand didn’t accept keys, magic charms, or office seals.
It accepted only an energetic deep ring handshake.
Carved across the console were eighteen hundred characters of dense, angular script—the core mnemonic formulae of the Nine-Fold Rotting Bone Chant (Jiu Zhuan Ming Gu Jue).
Behind him, Magistrate Cui looked at the stone carving and let out a strangled shriek. He fell backward onto the narrow high walkway.
“Don’t look at the characters!” Cui gasped, clawing at his silk robes. “That’s the forbidden bone-rotting manual! Three thousand years ago, forty-eight Grand Elders of the Southern Divine Sects tried to cultivate that script to master the Netherworld’s water gates! Every single one of them suffered bone-marrow liquefaction within two days! Their skeletons turned into grey chalk while they were still breathing!”
Lin Ke didn’t look away.
He didn’t read it as a spiritual discovery. He read it as a compiled driver specification for an ancient piece of hardware.
