At high tide a separate sea cave below his room at the Western Horn held four feet of water. He took the old needles down to finish the test he had begun on the dive. Salt had dried white on the ledges. Pei Jing set his tools on a dry shelf and opened a tray of twenty steel blanks.
The Armor-Piercing Thunder Needle had made the Silent Pavilion’s name in Thousand-Star City. In air, it could pierce a Grade Two ward before a man saw the flash. Pei Jing took a finished one from the old batch and threw it into the pool.
It struck with a flat thump. Two paces down, most of its speed was gone. By the third it had turned end over end. It sank into the sand.
Pei Jing waded in after it and dried it with a piece of linen. The water had pushed back harder than the rune could push forward. He needed a way to keep it from catching the steel at all.
He went back to the shelf. A Fire rune would give up its heat the moment it touched the water. He tried two runes that could work together. A Gale-Thrust Rune would carry the needle. The other would hold a thin pocket around it and keep the water back. It took him forty minutes to make the two patterns share the same thread of qi.
