In the main hall of the Heavenly Rhyme Pavilion, guests were making their way out, excitement written across their faces as they chatted with their companions. None had expected to witness the appearance of a genuine spirit weapon.
Just then, an ordinary-looking middle-aged martial artist stopped amid the crowd.
His companions were still laughing and chatting beside him, boasting about the bargain they had scored on the pills they had just bought at auction and promising to treat everyone later.
No one noticed him.
Nor did anyone notice the corners of his mouth splitting sideways.
The split widened and widened until it reached his ears, exposing two rows of jagged fangs.
Crack, crack-crack-crack.
A dense barrage of snapping bones came from inside his body, audible even through his flesh. His back arched high, bursting his martial robes from within. The fabric tore into strips that hung from his body, exposing a layer of dark red muscle beneath. Those muscles writhed like living creatures.
The middle-aged martial artist's vertebrae stabbed out through the flesh of his back one by one, becoming a row of jagged bone spikes. The longest was as long as a forearm, with scraps of flesh hanging from it, still dripping blood.
His arms swelled to three times their original thickness. His skin split, and thick, dark red fluid oozed from the cracks. When it dripped onto the blue bricks underfoot, their surfaces hissed and smoked.
In little more than ten breaths, a martial artist at true astral realm completion had become a flesh-and-blood monster nearly ten feet tall.
The martial artists still chatting beside him finally reacted. The one closest to the monster turned his head, his smile not yet gone, and found himself face-to-face with a bloody maw split all the way to its ears.
He