The diamond touched the needle with a click Pei Jing felt more than heard. He let his forearm settle. The nine-zhang pool in his Dantian lay still.
He began.
Hard steel fought the point. The pull came through the awl in a series of tiny catches. Pei Jing kept his wrist fixed and moved from the elbow. Between two beats of his heart, he made the first cut and lifted the point away.
He passed the silver scribe along the dry groove to clear the burr. One stroke done. Seventy-one to go.
The lamp hissed. A flake of soot drifted past the vise. Pei Jing lost track of everything except the pressure under his thumb and the steady thud of his heart.
At stroke forty-seven, the awl met something harder than the rest of the steel. The blank had come from a deep-mine drill, and a speck of slag lay buried just under the surface. The shaft bent sideways. The diamond jumped the line and cut into stroke thirty-nine.
Pei Jing set the tool down. His pulse was still sixteen. He opened the vise and felt the bad cut with his thumb. The two lines had joined where they should stay apart. A rush of qi could send the charge back toward his hand.
