The smell of crushed granite and burning marrow was choking.
Lin Ke lay pinned to the flat stone slabs by five iron nails, his right shoulder fully out-of-joint, the joint twisted beneath purple, swelling hematomas. Every shallow breath pulled at the cedar splint over his pinned collarbone. It sent white flares of nausea across his vision.
Through the ringing in his ears came the sound of running boots.
Zhao Wuji was sprinting across the white jade stones. He was flanked by six surviving elite Golden-Mask Judges.
The commercial director’s ritual brocade had been discarded. It showed a set of plate armor that gleamed with vulgar, blinding bright glare: the Grand Fortune Wealth-Armor.
The relic was forged from one hundred thousand melted high-grade spirit coins, alloyed with liquid gold and tightly packed into three layers of linked six-sided plates.
Around Zhao’s torso spun an iron-hard, three-foot aura of solid gold light, fueled by a nonstop internal reaction of burned up wealth.
In his hands, Zhao gripped twin daggers forged from sky gold, their tips humming with high-hum spatial shakes.
