The smell of burning soul-wax rolled down from the sky.
Grand Ancestor Kuang clawed his way to his knees against the cracked stone base of the sundial. His eyes, once arrogant and filled with hungry malice, were now bloodshot with the frenzy of a trapped hyena.
From inside his torn robes, he produced a black jade slab the size of a paving stone—the Crimson Vulture Master Soul Tablet.
Twelve names burned in eerie-glowing green fire across its surface, each tied by an analog karmic thread to the twelve clan elders standing guard on the war barge above.
“If I die, you burn with me!” Kuang shrieked, spitting black energetic sludge onto the jade. “Old family Harvest! All twelve of you—surrender your cores!”
Kuang channeled his dying training into the master tablet, activating the Monolithic Puppet Harvest.
High on the barge, twelve Late Golden Core elders gasped all at once. They grabbed their chests as thick cables of violet energy were wildly ripped from their dantians, feeding into the central tablet. Their flesh began to wither. Their hair turned grey as five decades of life-force were siphoned in three seconds to fuel a single, desperate suicide blast.
Node 1 hovered in the air twenty feet above Kuang.
