Pei Jing waited on a dry boulder eighty paces outside the mouth of the Devil’s Throat. He struck his flint and held the torch up when it caught. For several minutes the wake drew closer, knocking through one channel after another. His left hand stayed on the Cloud-Splitter.
The water rose in the reeds nearby. Two yellow eyes the size of shields opened above it. Now he could see the dragon’s head, nine feet long and covered in black plates that shone like glass. Three horns swept back from its crest. Faint colors moved in the yellow of its eyes, cast by the Water and Earth core buried in its skull.
It gripped the mangrove roots with its forelegs and dragged itself onto the mud. Five curved talons on each foot broke trunks that had stood a hundred years. A low wave rolled through the reeds.
The books in Red Mist Valley said a dragon like this breathed black frost and commanded lesser serpents. The men who wrote them had never stood here in the dark. They had cores and armor to sell.
Pei Jing watched how far the claws sank. In the torchlight the beast looked forty feet long or more. The claws went so deep into the mud that he put its weight near twenty thousand pounds. The chest itself looked under five feet wide. Its armored shoulders and forelegs spread nearly twice as far. The plates overlapped from skull to tail. A low-grade flying sword would glance…
