The demonic laughter choked in Patriarch Gui’s throat, turning into a wet, rattling gasp.
The emerald soul flames sputtered and collapsed into thin wisps of black smoke that drifted harmlessly across the frozen shale. Where a royal fighter’s dantian should have rotted into a puddle of gangrenous bile, Lin Tao stood with his hands resting casually at his sides. His breath rose in a rhythmic, undisturbed cloud of white vapor.
Patriarch Gui stared at Lin Tao. His skeletal hands shook so wildly that the Seven-Foot staff of the Nine-Ghost Flag rattled against the ivory railing of his carriage.
“Impossible...” Gui whispered, his voice cracking with the first genuine mortal terror he had felt in two hundred years. “You... You absorbed the Nether Soul Hex? You took the full draught of the Nine-Ghost Flame and didn’t scream?”
Lin Tao brushed a speck of cold black ash from the lapel of his linen cloak.
Null-bus defect checked, Lin Tao noted internally with deep, quiet satisfaction. The Nether Soul Hex is a semantic payload designed to exploit the spiritual absorption mechanics of a living dantian. It relies upon the host’s internal Qi breath flow to pull the poison into the main spirit veins. My lower belly has zero internal storage capacity. Because of that, the curse found no entry port, no receptive medium, and no memory address to infect. The entire malicious signal was dropped at the physical outer edge with zero body error.
