The air didn’t cool as night fell. It went brittle.
By the second day following Wu DeZheng’s office filing, the surrounding spiritual thickness didn’t merely slide. It plummeted off an invisible cliff.
Array Master Qi Heng had turned the valve.
Seventy-five percent drain tube throughput. Across the outer valleys of the Azure Cloud Sect, the consequences were not academic. They were gut-deep, brutal, and smelled of rot.
In the terraced barley fields below the seventh peak, three thousand acres of golden spirit grain turned black and withered in thirty-six hours, their stalks collapsing into slimy compost as the soil lost its spiritual holding power. Mountain springs that had flowed for eight hundred years stopped dead. That left dry limestone beds caked with dead, belly-up fish.
And inside the outer sect medical pavilions, the screaming had not stopped since noon.
Apothecary He stood in the center of the treatment ward, his hemp robes soaked to the elbows in dark, dark blood and bitter herbal vinegar. The old surgeon’s eyes were bloodshot. His hands shook as he pinned down a seventeen-year-old student who was thrashing wildly on a straw pallet.
“Hold his jaw!” Apothecary He barked, his voice raw from two days of shouting. “Don’t let him bite his tongue off! He’s having a backward bubbling blast!”
