Chapter 169

The bronze drum formation erupted from the abyss, its drumheads etched with Kui patterns that spat forth bolts of lightning. Su Jiuli’s residual embers swept across the fractured earth. The Netherworld Decree Mark on her wrist suddenly peeled away like a snake shedding its skin, and the dark red shards coiled around her drumsticks, striking out the long-lost "Soul-Quaking Melody." The instant the sticks hit the drumheads, the walls of the abyss revealed murals of three hundred shamans dancing in fire—their bare feet branded with Heavenly Fox totems, their palms cradling not ritual vessels, but the shattered fragments of Lin Xuan’s Destiny Soul! "Sister can actually chime the Abyss-Startling Drum..." Lu Xiaopang’s shadow seeped from the drumhead, his withered fingers crushing a lightning-patterned bone nail. The nail shards fell to the ground and transformed into vipers, but the serpents were shattered by the drumbeats before they could reach him. The broken scales condensed into the phantom of an armillary sphere. Amidst the grinding sound of the rotating celestial disks, nine bronze cauldrons rose in the center of the drum formation, filled with a boiling Tribulation Magma that fused Heavenly Fox Ancestral Blood with Star Sand.