Ling Xiao rose. Cold spread through the hall, and the incense drew into a tight spiral around his feet. The Wind-Severing Jade Sword hissed as he drew it. It measured seven feet from point to pommel. Pei Jing could see the shadow of the throne through the pale green edge. The jade had come from the deep Southern Ocean. For sixty years Ling Xiao had fed it the qi of rare beasts that lived on the wing.
“You could have been an emperor,” Ling Xiao said. “Now they’ll use your bones to scrub these steps.”
The patriarch stepped into the air. His Nine-Sky Cloud-Stepping Stride took him past the pillars in a streak of violet. The open doors let him out into the mountain wind.
Pei Jing put the iron cleaver back at his hip. By the time he walked outside, Ling Xiao was forty paces away, standing two feet above the terrace. Low clouds streamed around the peak. Their tops were gold in the morning sun. The air in the hall had been too still and crowded for the patriarch’s greatest art. Out here the wind had a clear path to the sword.
Ling Xiao raised the jade blade. The core in his belly flared. Forty years of blood pills fed the light as he gathered it into one cut.
