The gaping circular maw of the Iron-Toothed Marsh Leech dropped through the yellow mist, its nested rings of serrated teeth whistling with air-powered suction.
Eighteen inches. Twelve inches. Six inches.
Pei Jing didn’t try to swing his cleaver through the water. Underwater drag would bleed seventy percent of his blade’s striking speed. It allowed the creature’s muscular driving force to carry it through the strike and crush his pelvis beneath five hundred pounds of thrashing meat.
Instead, he engaged the Spirit Wind Stride.
His left foot tapped the underwater root of the cypress, not with bone-shaking force, but with the elastic, twisting snap of a coiled bowstring.
A hairline wisp of wood-wind spiritual energy surged along his plantar muscle tissue and Achilles tendon.
His body didn’t splash. It pivoted.
In a barely noticeable split second, Pei Jing rotated ninety degrees on his left heel. His torso slid laterally through the water with zero surface rough churning, like a dry leaf swept aside by an unfelt draft.
