When the Bronze Sarcophagus collided with the waves of the North Sea, the nine new steles on the Qingqiu Scorched Earth suddenly began to seep blood. Su Jiuli’s toes brushed against the floating ice, and the silver bells of the Marriage Scroll Blood Pact on her wrists chimed without a breeze. The rhythm of the trembling bell clappers perfectly matched the cadence of the blood flowing from the stele inscriptions. As she brushed her hand over the most recently fractured Nine-Tailed Celestial Fox stele, the Wu Clan funerary scriptures etched into its surface suddenly shifted and rearranged. Three hundred bronze rivets emerged from the gaps in the text, and the dragon-kin reverse scale patterns coiled around their shafts were identical to the scars on her own tailbone.
"Snap—"
A sharp, metallic sound of chains snapping echoed from the base of the stele. The scorched earth cracked open, revealing an abyss from which nine bronze figures draped in seaweed climbed out, Netherworld Soul Fire dancing within their hollow eye sockets. Su Jiuli ignited the Ancestral Fire remaining from her severed tail, but the flames were swallowed by the fragments of an Astrolabe embedded in the foreheads of the figures. In the ghostly image formed by the shifting fragments, the First Generation Patriarch was driving half of an Azure Dragon Reverse Scale into the earth’s vein—and connected to the end of that scale was the very Bronze Sarcophagus drifting in the depths of the North Sea!
Chapter 141