The morning wind smelled of burning pitch, dried fish, and bilge water. Pei Jing stood at the highest point of Coral Spike, a hundred and forty paces above the foam. The brim of his hat kept the glare out of his eyes. Violet light caught on the forty-pound Cloud-Splitter across his shoulders.
Black-hulled war junks filled the shipping lanes. There were more than eighty of them. At their center sailed a three-decked ship of ironwood with a crimson pennant thirty feet long. A white skull wept in the wind.
Blood-Eyed Jiao commanded from that ship. He’d reached Early Golden Core long before the last of his rivals agreed to sail for him. Over thirty years, he had brought the thirty-six pirate clans of the Broken Islands under one banner.
When Sword Sovereign Xiao’s tomb opened three days earlier, Jiao had sent his decree to every island and sandbar within three hundred leagues.
Independent cultivators, pearl divers, and refugees were to give Blood Sail four-fifths of their stones, food, and ships. Anyone fit to fight would be taken into the vanguard and sent into the tomb. Anyone who refused could watch his island burn.
Some had fled north toward the Great Yan estuary. Others had been put aboard pirate transports. Jiao would send them through the old wards first.
