Pei Jing dropped the last hundred fathoms and landed on polished green stone. There was no mud under his boots. The old wards had kept the tiles clear of silt for twelve hundred years. At this depth the sea pressed in from every side. He let the load settle through his bones and kept his water qi moving under his skin.
The bronze arch was two hundred paces wide and eighty tall. Its pillars had turned green with age, but there was no trace of a barnacle on them. He crossed to the eastern pillar. It showed Sword Sovereign Xiao at the prow of an iron ship, facing three horned flood dragons. Their coils stretched across the South Sea. On the western pillar, Xiao drove his blade into the seabed and split the land shelf, setting a border between the human realm and the deep.
The two bronze-clad stone swordsmen stood a hundred feet tall. Their hands rested on the hilts of greatswords set into the floor. There was still a trace of Xiao’s intent in their faces. Even the creatures that lived at the bottom of the trench kept their distance.
Between the statues stretched a thin sheet of sword qi. It shone with all the colors of a diamond turned in the light. An ancient spirit-gathering formation drew heat from deep in the earth to keep it in place. On Pei Jing’s side lay the weight of five thousand fathoms of seawater. Beyond the gate, lamplight shone on…
