At twenty-four thousand feet, wind ran across the granite in one long hiss. Pei Jing tightened the strap on the Nine-Fold Astral Bone Blade. Oiled horsehide covered the sheath to keep frost out of the latch. The air was too thin for an ordinary man to climb much farther. It tasted clean after the last of the sulfur flats.
He stopped on a shelf just below the summit of Sky-Piercing Celestial Peak. Clouds hid the valley to his left. Far below those clouds, people who had come through Iron Gate Gorge were putting up cabins and sowing wheat in soil blackened by ash. Travelers had brought word that some were carving a cleaver and a whetstone on river boulders. They called him the Rootless Sovereign.
It had taken him three months to travel five hundred leagues and gather enough food to stay on the mountain. He was still in his eighty-first year since waking in Cloudford. He remembered the relief on the first faces to come out of the gorge. He hoped the new fields would take. He had left while the wagons were still on the road. No one there needed him to decide where their houses should stand.
