Chapter 121 — All Things Perish
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
The instant he sensed the magic energy surging abruptly within that slave's body, Gao Yang knew something was badly wrong. He hurled himself forward, triggering the knight's Charge skill the moment he set off, and shouted a warning at the registrar, who still had not reacted: "Danger! Get down!"
The registrar reacted half a beat too late. By then the slave's entire body had swollen violently, an ominous red glow bleeding out from his bloated, splitting flesh as countless chaotic, malevolent runes raced across his skin. The wretched man, long since stripped of his senses, finally loosed a scream of agony—but before he could fully burst apart into a bomb, Gao Yang reached him.
An iron gauntlet wreathed in white light swept in from the side, shoving the living bomb away from the crowd. A blurry shadow flickered past Gao Yang an instant later; Amber emerged from the darkness and slammed the utterly frozen registrar roughly to the ground.
The explosion followed. The slave, sent flying, burst like a balloon swollen past its limit, every scrap of flesh and bone in that instant turned to lethal shrapnel spraying in all directions. Even far from the crowd, some of the harder bone fragments still rattled against the wooden table at the registration point, leaving pits of varying depth—had Amber not put the registrar on the ground in time, the poor wretch would have been killed or at least had his face ruined.
Only then did the others begin to react. Soldiers on guard in the distance came running; Hedy raised a magic barrier at once and activated Detect Distortion to check whether any other danger remained. The registrar who had cheated death crawled trembling out from under the table, a perfectly clear boot print stamped across his face.
"Lock down the area. No unauthorized personnel in or out," Gao Yang ordered loudly and rapidly, glancing at the scorched crater left on the docks. "Dock guards, stop those ships and take the slavers into custody—and bring back the last batch of slaves who finished registering! Move!"
At those clear, precise orders everyone sprang into action. Hedy dashed to Gao Yang's side and anxiously looked him over. "Ancestor, are you all right?!"
"Fine. An explosion of that scale can't hurt me," Gao Yang waved a hand. "Any residual aura left at the scene?"
Hedy shook her head, and just as she was about to say something, another voice came suddenly from nearby: "What's going on, what's going on—don't tell me you're still here testing art?!"
Gao Yang looked toward the voice and saw Pi Yun running over. This druid was charged with inspecting the health of slaves arriving in the territory; he and a few new apothecary apprentices of his had been waiting on the other side of the docks, and had come running the moment they heard the commotion.
Amber was still shouting, badly shaken: "How should I know! Someone just up and self-destructed over here! Scared me half to death!"
"A poor slave, suspected of having been made into a living bomb by some evil magic," Hedy explained, her face dark, and gave a rough account of what had happened. "...Very much like Corpse Explosion, but that man was clearly alive right before the blast—he could even walk."
Pi Yun's expression darkened the instant he heard Hedy's description, and a certain complex, deep wariness entered his eyes. He said little, striding quickly toward the very center of the blast.
Though a living man had burst apart right there, there was not much blood or flesh scattered about. The evil art seemed to have produced an extremely high temperature the moment it activated, heating him from the inside out; all the burst remains had been carbonized, and near the scorched crater there was only a great quantity of black, hard fragments.