The clouds sank until they hung four hundred paces above the basin. Iron swords lifted out of the mud and turned their points toward the crater. In the trenches, soldiers pressed their hands to their ears. Horses had gone down in their traces, and the war mammoths lay with their flanks heaving.
Pei Jing rose eighty paces above the smoking shaft and stopped. He felt the core turn in his dantian. Its pull met the weight of the air and held him as if he were standing on a flat stone. His coat had torn open on the way up. Thin red seams from the forge burns caught the gold light across his bare chest and arms. The Astral Bone Blade was still on his back, and the needle guards and the Black Mountain Whetstone hung from his belt.
On the Cloud Mist flagship, an officer caught the rail as the deck tilted.
“Who is that? Look at him. There’s no badge. No crest at all.”
Patriarch Cang Yunzi looked down at the bare stone around the shaft. What had been three thousand paces of solid rock a moment ago was now an open hole. He turned his eyes back to the man standing in the air.
