The raised road ran three hundred yards across the outer rift. Mist and weeks of rain had left its black stone slick.
Pei Jing stopped to tighten the hemp binding on his left sandal. He could feel a low hum in the road through his heel. Several months of roads and river barges lay behind him. He had paid his way in mortal coin where he could and mended fittings or unloaded barges for the rest. His spirit stones had stayed in their pouches. So did the cave high on Thunder Cliff, where three bolts of heavenly lightning had fused stone and nearly crushed his ribs. He still remembered the taste of scorched air. Below his navel, liquid qi rested in a crystal basin nine zhang across. The lightning had left his bones stronger than before.
He wore a plain hemp tunic and a bamboo hat. His flask, awl, and purse hung from a sharkskin belt. The old chipped cleaver he used as cover rode on his back. The reforged Cloud-Splitter stayed out of sight in storage, its edge intact in the dragon-hide sheath. The twelve needles still lay in his bracers.
The northern wall of Thousand-Star Celestial City rose ahead through the mist. Ten thousand years ago, a meteorite had left a bowl sixty li wide. Great Yan had never ruled this far south. Five merchant syndicates and the fleets that served the Boundless Sea held the land. Masons and rogue cultivators had cut the city into the walls…
