A bow needed room to draw. A spring gave itself away with a click. Even a needle thrown by hand made a sound, and the farther it traveled, the less force it carried.
On Day Eleven he’d spent two hours shaping eight more blanks, numbers seventeen through twenty-four. They still needed final work. On Day Twelve, Pei Jing sat at the stone table in Cell 114 and turned the twenty-fifth blank under the lamp.
“I need the wind to carry it.”
He had drawn up a second set of runes to make the needle fly faster. While the first set held a charge of Chaos Qi, the new one would draw air around the needle in a tight spiral and carry it forward. It would move on its own once the runes woke.
He set to work with the dry diamond awl. When the cuts were ready, he cleared the burrs with his silver scribe and put a little thunder bile in each groove with the dropper. His fingers were steadier since his breakthrough to Tier Two. He could feel the point ride along the curved metal and catch whenever it came too close to the first set of runes. After forty-five minutes, three faint violet spirals shone at the tail of the blank.
