At fifty fathoms, the green glow of the burning fleet faded to a dull haze. At two hundred, the last trace of light was gone. By five hundred fathoms, Pei Jing could hear only the low hum of the trench drawing water into its depths.
He let the current carry him. The forty-pound Cloud-Splitter was strapped along his spine, and its weight kept him steady as the water moved around him in layers.
At a thousand fathoms, the cold reached all the way to his joints. The water pressed down with about a hundred and eighty times the pressure at the surface. Pei Jing sensed a faint spark of qi twenty paces to his left. He turned toward it and made out the body of a young Heavenly Sword Sect student. A scrap of a Grade-2 Water-Evading Talisman still clung to his robe. Its air pocket had collapsed. Two corsairs drifted nearby, their brass helmets crushed and their air bladders torn.
Pei Jing’s lungs were empty. Under Turtle Breathing, his heart beat once every ten seconds and his blood drew strength from the qi stored in his bones. He felt the pressure all the way down his spine. His strengthened bones took the load while his water qi flowed through the soft tissue around them. He kept that protection close to his body as the current pulled him deeper.
