Deacon Wu was a fighter of the Nether Soul Path, trained to terrorize mortal soldiers with wailing spectral illusions and poisonous ghost flames.
Against an ordinary martial artist, his bone dagger—dipped in the distilled bile of ninety-nine corpses—would have inflicted rotting soul black rot with a mere scratch. Lin Tao closed the distance. Then, Wu thrust the jagged dagger toward Lin Tao’s throat with a poisonous snarl, channeling his full Core Formation spiritual training into the strike.
A jet of green-black soul fire erupted from the blade. It screamed with the sound agony of tormented souls.
Lin Tao didn’t blink. He didn’t retreat.
His test left eye tracked the incoming thrust with tiny sharp-angled care, decomposing the attack vector into speed, flight path, and turning force.
At the exact moment the poisonous blade was forty-a tiny fraction of an inch from his collar, Lin Tao pivoted his left heel three inches outward. The green ghost flame brushed harmlessly past the coarse wool of his traveling cloak. It scorched a few stray fibers but failing to contact flesh.
In the same fluid motion, Lin Tao’s right hand whipped out from beneath his sleeve.
Between his first two fingers, he held the four-inch cold-drawn steel metal pen, its pure-crystal star-white-gold micro-needle extended two inches from the tip.
