The first bolt had yet to reach Sky-Piercing Peak, but the air was already humming. Pei Jing could feel it through the blade in his hands.
The old manuals told a cultivator to put up a ward and let the lightning break the Golden Core. If it struck just hard enough, the soul inside would survive. Pei Jing thought of a man trying to open a locked strongbox by setting off a charge. The lid might come off. The papers inside might burn with it.
He wanted the first cracks to follow lines he had chosen himself.
He drove the point of the Nine-Fold Astral Bone Blade into the plateau. The granite closed around it. He lowered his hips, gripped the ray-skin handle and shut his eyes.
Inside his Dantian, nine bands of hardened essence held the Golden Core together. A nine-inch soul sat in the space within them. It set its small blade beside one knee and rested its hands on its legs. Its black skin still had room for the armor he meant to put over it.
Pei Jing drew his qi-blood inward. He held it above the core until it felt like a block of cold iron. Then he brought the weight down.
