Four Grade One Fire-Burst Talismans flared together. Their light turned the shaft white for a moment. Then a pillar of orange fire, black smoke, and crushed granite shot into the storm.
The whole Devil’s Throat shook. Rock broke loose from the canyon walls and fell in sheets. The tremor carried through the mountain to the ore veins of Thunder Cliff, two miles away.
The heat washed over Pei Jing’s robes where he’d pulled the cord, twenty paces from the trap. The blast took his feet out from under him. His ears rang. The Chaos Root kept earth and metal qi moving through his bones, and his ribs held as the stone shook beneath him.
He waited for the falling gravel to thin, then rolled to his knees and drew the twenty-two-pound Cloud-Splitter.
Smoke churned in the trench. Fire had burned away the softer scales beneath the dragon’s belly. Three of its ribs had broken. The lung injured in the fall gave way, and green foam spilled from its jaws.
Then the beast shrieked.
Its core held three hundred years of water and earth qi. Light rose through the cracks in its armor. The yellow-green aura wrapped its burned body and forced the muscles to move through the poison. The wound in its lung began to close.
