The blood leaking from Zhao Wuji’s shattered knees formed a dark, sluggish puddle across the dark rock floor.
Under forty times static gravity, the fluid didn’t spread naturally. It pooled thick and heavy like molten tar, pinning the hem of the merchant’s emerald silk robes to the stone. Zhao was sobbing, his fingernails torn raw from clawing uselessly at the floorboards. His high-born face was pressed flat against the rock dust.
Yet, through the tears of blinding pain, a twisted, jagged sneer cut across his bloody lips.
“You... You think you’ve won, Lin Ke?” Zhao gasped, every syllable whistling through broken teeth as his chest muscle struggled against eight tons of crushing force. “You think... This tower is about an outer-sect ranking?”
Lin Ke stepped forward, his locked knees clicking in the crimson gloom, stopping beside Zhao’s trembling head.
“Talk,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat as an iron ledger.
Zhao let out a wet, rattling laugh that sprayed bloody foam across the stones.
“The check... Was a diversion,” Zhao sneered, his bloodshot eyes rolling up to meet Lin Ke’s dead stare. “While the elders... Watch the students die in the tower... Elder Kuang and the Crimson Vulture Clan... Are already purging the Seventh Ward. The furnaces... The melted rock waste trenches... They’re razing it all to bedrock.”
