Inside the Duty Room of Block C, Room Shen prison, the stove flickered with crimson tongues of flame, yet could not dispel the damp chill and bloody stench steeped into the cracks in the walls. Outside, dense autumn rain pattered against the roof tiles, its rapid, fragmented sounds intertwining with the monotonous scrape of sharpening inside to form a murderous movement.
Iron Bull sat cross-legged on the floor, the massive hammer covered in minced flesh and bone dregs resting across his knees. Each time the whetstone in his hand scraped across its face, clear water washed away another dark streak of blood, revealing the original, biting gleam of wrought iron. Mo Qianshan stood beside the desk, his movements mechanical and precise as he emptied the Storage Bag stripped from Zhou Tong's corpse, sorting pills with pills and banknotes with banknotes, followed at last by a pile of command arrows and Secret Letters bearing the Demon Suppression Division's covert markings.
Fang Mo reclined deep in the tiger-pelt-lined Grand Tutor Chair, holding a dark red Jade Slip between his fingertips.
The Jade Slip was warm and smooth throughout, but several threads of blood, barely discernible to the naked eye, wandered within it, and its surface had been reinforced with an exceedingly vicious "Soul Locking Restriction." If an ordinary martial artist recklessly extended his Divine Sense into it, the restriction would instantly lash back, shattering his Sea of Consciousness into dregs.
Fang Mo did not use True Qi to break it by force. He merely gazed calmly at the Jade Slip as, deep within his pupils, the phantom of that ancient, magnificent Black Prison slowly turned.
A supreme Warden Will descended.
Before this will, the hideous blood-thread restrictions on the Jade Slip gave a faint whimper, then melted away like ice and snow,