"Mountain God above, kill these outsiders!" the one-eyed burly man with the broken arm raised both hands high and roared hoarsely.
The instant the words left his mouth, he dared not linger. Having finished the spirit-summoning tune on his Kangdong bone flute, he took advantage of everyone's attention being drawn to the disturbance below the cliff and scrambled into a rocky gully beside the mountain, dragging his broken arm.
The lingering flute notes echoed back and forth through the valley, and the dense gray-black mist pooled beneath the cliff suddenly surged upward.
Heavy mountain mist welled up from below the cliff. It was not white, but gray-black, mixed with old corpse ash.
Muffled sounds of bones being compressed and dry, frozen flesh sticking and rubbing together kept coming from within the mist. Layer upon layer of cracking sounds made the listeners' hearts tighten.
The broken bones and frost-rotted chunks of countless travelers pushed off the cliff by the Moon-Ear Tribe over thousands of years were forcibly lifted by the cold power underground, slowly assembling into a malformed giant several dozen feet tall at the center of the mist.
The Cold Corpse Zan Demon took full shape.
It had no regular human form. Its torso was fused from the frozen corpses of hundreds upon thousands of generations of merchants, travelers, and captives. Four flattened, distorted human skulls were stacked on its left shoulder, their gums exposed and packed with ice deposits that had not melted for years;
Its limbs were thousands of severed limbs of varying lengths, haphazardly tangled and frozen together.
Ice encased all the remains, its surface covered in fine cracks formed by years of freezing. Countless travelers' lingering souls and deathly energies were entwined within every crack.
For hundreds upon thousands of years, the Moon-Ear Tribe had plundered