On the ninth day, Pei Jing worked the last grit out of the core. It came away slowly. Each time his breathing grew uneven, a fire flared along one of the new joins. The stone under him was too hot for bare feet. He ate the last of that day’s ration before he tried again.
By noon, the surface of the core was clear. Only the force of the Heavenly Tribulation could close the shell. He put the jade bottle away empty and moved his gear to the high side of the platform. Down in the crack, he could see the red light rising.
At noon, a shadow fell over the Iron Rift Basin. Purple clouds turned above the crater, streaked with black lightning. The darkness reached the northern peaks of Cloud Mist Mountain and the southern desert beyond Burning Sun Valley, three hundred miles apart. Birds dropped out of the air. In the trenches, thirty thousand soldiers lowered their weapons. Some knelt where they stood. Others tried to put their hands over their ears, though no thunder had reached them yet.
From the deck of his flagship, Patriarch Cang Yunzi watched the purple cloud take shape.
“We thought it was a treasure in the earth,” he said. “That’s a Heavenly Tribulation. The Nine-Heavenly Martial Tribulation.”
