One by one, with the same quiet, domestic sound — the sound a person makes when indicating a realization, when punctuating a thought — the male elders of the Plum Blossom sect ceased to exist from the neck up. Each pop was its own small, total event. Each one left a brief, hot spray and then nothing, the bodies dropping with the loose, sudden collapse of structures that have lost their organizing principle.
The female elders screamed.
Not the cultivator screams of women fighting or defending — the raw, involuntary screams of bodies that had just watched something that bypassed all cultivation processing and went directly to the oldest, most fundamental fear architecture in the nervous system. They threw themselves sideways, backward, forward, their robes drenched in the spray of their colleagues, their Nascent Soul cultivation bases blazing with a defensive urgency that was responding to a threat it had absolutely no capacity to actually engage.
"PLEASE — ANCESTOR — PLEASE STOP —"
