Archon Xuan Ming knelt upon the cold white marble of the fifth tier, the shattered fragments of his diamond-inlaid armor littering the steps around him like broken icicles.
His breath came in shallow, wheezing gasps that rattled through his chest. Without the surrounding spiritual Qi that had lubricated his internal organs for three thousand years, the ancient, dried-out joint padding in his knees and hips screamed with every tiny fraction of an inch of movement. He tried to push himself upright with his uninjured left hand. But the friction of his mortal bones against dry socket joints was an agony so foreign and intense that a hoarse whimper escaped his lips.
Lin Tao stopped three paces below him, his land-mapper satchel hanging loosely from his shoulder.
He didn’t look at Xuan Ming with gloating malice or victorious swagger. He looked at the fallen Archon with the dispassionate, cold and exact eye of a physician examining an advanced stage of physical degeneration.
“Your joint fluid has dried out,” Lin Tao observed calmly, his fingers resting near the medical pouches at his belt. “For three thousand years, you relied on spiritual water drops to coat your joints. When I revoked your power certificates, the backup life-support pumps in the dais shut off. Your bones are now grinding directly against one another without lubrication.”
