Pei Jing waited on the ledge until the silt settled. Nothing came out of the crevasse. He withdrew to a notch high in the wall of the recess. The old corsair ward he’d recharged kept air trapped against the roof. He climbed into the pocket for the night, breathed freely, and ate dried meat with spring water. The shelter let him recover without burning the marrow he needed for the next dive. When it was time for his second day’s practice, he went back to the ledge.
The gap was eighty paces wide and dropped another two hundred feet. Pei Jing stepped off the edge and shifted the qi in his Dantian to control his descent. The walls drew closer around him. White veins ran through the dark quartzite, and clusters of tube worms stuck out from the cracks. At the bottom, two slabs of rock leaned toward each other over a flat shelf.
The meteor lay in the middle of the shelf. It was twenty paces across and looked like a black skull half melted into the rock. Its surface was covered in hollows like deep thumbprints. A dim violet light hung in the water around it. As Pei Jing drew closer, his body grew heavier. His boots came down hard and sank into a layer of iron dust and crushed shells.
