A burning wilderness.
Lava flowed and churned freely across the scorching ground.
A black sedan chair passed through the pungent stench of sulfur and billowing toxic haze, flickering in and out of sight like a light bulb on an unstable power supply.
Each time it flickered, it abruptly advanced several hundred meters.
Inside the sedan chair.
Two men sat facing each other.
"We're almost there."
"The master of White Bone City is called Wang Kui. He's already stepped onto the path to becoming a Half-God."
The man in charge had a deeply unnatural complexion.
Deathly gray.
Dark and dull.
Covered in strange wrinkles.
He showed no sign of being alive, yet warmth from his blood seeped out, indicating that he was actually a human rather than an Evil Spirit.
"Wang Kui?"
"The man who's half skeleton?"
The other man asked.
This man's face was deathly pale, as though dusted with white powder, but his lips were a vivid crimson.
He gave off a bizarre, terrifying air.
And that was not all.
Neither man dressed like a normal person, either. The man in charge wore a black burial shroud covered in crooked characters for "good fortune," written in blood.
The pale man wore a patched short jacket of coarse cloth.
He looked like a laborer.
But on his feet were wooden clogs a foot tall.
Ridiculous and strange.
"No."
"The half-skeletal man is the past self Wang Kui severed from himself. His true body is in a villa, which is also our destination."
"The Deadfire Prison leads directly to that villa."
The man in the burial shroud spoke.
"Lord Du Qiu, what if he refuses the trade?" the pale man asked.
Du Qiu.
That was the name of the man in the burial shroud.
It was a very strange surname. His