Three miles west of the gate, Pei Jing found a hollow between two ridges. Water ran through it in spring. Now the ground was dry and covered in needles. He sat on an overturned stump and unrolled the maintenance scrolls across a slab of mica. Four river stones held down the corners. Thin shafts of light came through the dwarf pines.
He mixed pine soot ink with a little water. Beside the sect’s drawings, he spread the map he had made at Cold Pine Pass. The roads had changed since he was young. The rock hadn’t. He knew where granite gave way to sandstone and where autumn rain filled old ravines. A formation could hide a mountain in fog. It still needed the ground beneath it to hold.
The maintenance books confirmed which pylons carried weight and which bled it off. If he attacked the strongest anchors first, the other branches would feed them. If he released the failing ones in the west and followed the load east and north, the weight would pass to the two keystones. He could let it out from there without dropping the peaks. He drew a line through the first two days and wrote his deadline under it. Ten days at most.
