The moonlight was torn to shreds by dark clouds, and Su Han's hand finally dropped to the ground. Su Qingxue knelt in the bloody sludge, her fingertips clutching her father's blood-stained sleeve, her tear mole blurred into a smudge amidst the crimson. She heard Ye Fan's voice pierce through the cries of the weeping Nether Soldiers like an ice-tempered sword: "Qingxue! Trigger the earth spikes!"
That was the night when she was twelve, when her father had crouched with her beneath the blue stone slabs to carve the mechanisms. "The earth spikes must be hidden under the third tile," Su Han's fingertips had been stained with copper powder. "When the enemy steps on them, three hundred poison-tempered steel needles can pierce three inches of dark iron armor." Now she knelt beside her father's corpse, her fingernails digging deep into the cracks of the blue bricks, tasting the metallic flavor of rust in her throat—not blood, but the mechanism tiles she had carved for a decade, which were now vibrating in tune with her inner Qi.
"Click." The instant three hundred silver needles pierced the tile surface, a flash of her father teaching her how to mix poisons crossed Su Qingxue's eyes. "Aconitum must be paired with snow silkworm powder," he had said, "so that the toxicity doesn't rush too fast through the blood vessels." But now the poison she mixed was Bone-Corroding Poison, fed specifically to these fleshless Nether Soldiers—letting their ghostly Qi taste the sensation of being corr…
Chapter 402