The beam struck the spine of the Astral Bone Blade. The sound was like wet silk tearing.
The blade held. Pei Jing had forged it from star iron and dragon bone. His own Martial Saint marrow ran through the metal. An ordinary spirit blade could lose its edge as soon as its supply of qi was cut. The grain he had set into this one under Sword Sovereign Xiao’s tomb stayed in place.
Black light split along the edge. One half flashed east, and the other flashed west. Both passed above the floor of the gorge.
The eastern beam cut into the upper cliff. The western beam took a matching piece from the other side. Forty paces across and sixty feet deep, the stone simply vanished from each rim. The archers had left those ledges at Pei Jing’s order. Now smooth dark walls caught the light where the crews had stood. No dust came off them.
Then the weight of the strike came down through Pei Jing’s hands. It hit his spine and passed into the corpse under his boots. Morok’s ribs broke. The plates on the general’s back turned to black powder, and Pei Jing fell through the dust and landed on granite.
