The ancient bronze bell hung suspended over the Wu Clan altar, its surface carved with gluttonous-ogre patterns that seemed to devour the moonlight. The lingering embers of Su Jiuli’s spirit drifted against the bell, and the Netherworld Decree Mark on her wrist suddenly writhed like a living snake. The dark red markings crawled over the ancient seal scripts on the bell, burning into them the long-lost sacrificial dance patterns of the Celestial Fox lineage. As the bronze clapper within the bell trembled, ghost-fire flickered at the four corners of the altar. Within the glow emerged the phantoms of three hundred Wu Priests dancing upon bones—bones that were, in fact, the skulls of successive generations of Celestial Fox elders.
"The blood moon shall eclipse, and the ancestral soul shall return..."
The Great Wu Priest’s incantations mingled with the chime of bone bells. Su Jiuli’s fox tail swept across the altar's stone steps, and the tortoise-shell cracks on the surface erupted with blood-red light. The blood droplets coalesced into the phantom of Lu Xiaopang. His withered fingers crushed a bronze tripod ear shaped like a human face, and the shards fell to the ground, turning into sand. Through the grains, the horrific truth of the Celestial Fox forbidden grounds was revealed: the foundations of nine blood-weeping steles had split into abyssal fissures, and the inscriptions on them had been rewritten by Bronze Roots into a Star Orbit map for the sacrifice of the Qingqiu Leyl…
Chapter 163