The kraken struck the bottom of Black Reef Harbor. The seabed shook. Black silt and blue blood rolled past Pei Jing’s crevice.
The beast still had strength left in its arms. One eighty-foot tentacle carved a furrow five feet deep. Its toothed cups broke twenty tons of stone off a reef. Another struck the keel of a wreck and snapped the oak beams.
Pei Jing waited thirty paces away with his boots braced against granite. Turtle Breathing held his pulse at six. The tentacles swung in shorter arcs as the blood stopped reaching their tips. At last the arms began to let go of the mud.
The mantle lay on its side. Between it and the roots of the tentacles was a vault of gristle twelve feet thick, with the beast’s brain inside.
Pei Jing pushed off the rock. He held the forty-pound Cloud-Splitter in his right hand. A thin layer of Gang Qi moved along its edge and turned the water there to a line of tiny bubbles.
He reached the kraken’s head. Barnacles and bits of star iron crusted the dark purple skin. Below three inches of blubber lay gristle tougher than oak.
A tentacle curled in behind him. He felt the shift in the water and turned, holding one foot against the barnacles. The toothed cups swept inches past his shoulder.
