Sunlight came in under the oilcloth. It was white on the summit while the valleys were still in shadow. Pei Jing set three rolls of flax parchment across the hide he’d slept on. He had made the rubbings from the Precursor World-Severing Tablet, the fragment he’d bought in Grand Desolation for twelve hundred high-grade spirit stones. At his first safe camp after Iron Gate, he had pressed the flax against the bronze and worked in graphite by hand. The tablet returned a probe of divine sense with enough force to injure a reader. The rubbings carried the shapes of the marks, so he could read them by ordinary light. He still left the bronze covered beside him.
He dipped an iron pen into black walnut ink and copied the eighth column of runes. The marks looked like the figures on a builder’s drawing. They showed how much weight a given shape could hold, how heat moved through it, and when pressure would make it change.
The sect manuals taught the Return to the Ancient Womb. A cultivator melted the Golden Core and gave the power to a Nascent Soul shaped like a naked infant. Pei Jing had read the same account in two different sect libraries. Neither said what happened to that infant if it lost the body around it.
