At dawn, the Star-Suppressing Great Array hummed thirty times a second. The five stones in the channels flared green. Their qi joined the earth vein and rushed down Pei Jing’s Conception Vessel.
He sat upright on the serpentine dais and began the final two-hour session.
The column in his dantian turned twelve hundred times a minute. It stood five point nine zhang high at forty-two times the pressure of the air outside. A hard layer of old waste still held where the column met the disc. Most cultivators paid fifty mid-grade stones for a pill to break it or asked an elder to guide the current.
Pei Jing had ten days of work, twenty stones’ worth of fuel by the time the last set burned out, and the body he’d built since Cloudford.
He drew one breath over eighty seconds. His ribs held as his chest drove three tons of force into the dantian. The column struck the layer beneath it.
The cave rang. Pei Jing felt it in his teeth.
The hard layer broke into bright dust and vanished into the current. The liquid settled into the opening below, linking the column and disc. The column held at six zhang. Its furious spin slowed. Silver lightning ran through the heavier qi. He heard a faint metal chime inside his bones.
