The air in the Central Plaza cooled by thirty degrees in two seconds.
The silver arbiters took three measured paces forward, their boots ringing on the clean marble with timed together care. Their blades gleamed with the cold, pale soft glow of Seventh-Rank Execution Steel. Weapons forged specifically to sever immortal souls from their physical shells without leaving a mark on the skin.
Between them, the man with the jade glasses stood motionless. They looked down his sharp nose with the cold, calm focus of a butcher inspecting cattle.
“Inspector Cui Heng,” Wu DeZheng squeaked, his voice pitching so high it nearly vanished into the rafters. The old elder’s glasses fogged over fully with panic. “The Iron-Faced Clerk. Three hundred years ago, he carried out forty-eight students of the Flying Feather Sect because their travel visas were missing a backup tax chop!”
In his mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran seven defensive permutations.
In branch one, Meng Shan charged with his iron-hard metal stance. Cui Heng didn’t even draw a blade. He raised his eight-inch jade ruler, activating the plaza’s outer edge ward. A hundred thousand volts of crushing weight lightning slammed from the marble floor into Meng Shan’s boots, short-circuiting his nervous system in 0.2 seconds.
