The nineteenth bolt ripped the air open. A violet line dropped out of a break in the clouds. It made no sound. Where it passed, there was a narrow strip of nothing.
Pei Jing had seen that kind of break in the Underground Void Eye. The star iron could take a hammer blow. A gap in space could take a piece out of the blade without striking it at all.
He lowered the tip and turned the edge into the line. The sword intent met the break as it came down. Two violet sheets passed on either side of him. They cut into the summit twenty feet behind him, leaving trenches so clean that he could see the layers in their walls. No chips had fallen from them. The missing rock was simply gone.
The thin edges of the bolt had caught him. He felt cold across his chest and shoulders. Then thirty-two narrow cuts opened in his skin. Drops of blood floated off him in little red beads before the gaps took them.
Worse, the bolt had pulled at the spirit channels in his chest. He felt them stretch like glass that had gone soft in a fire. If one of them came loose from where it joined his organs, the next bolt could tear it all the way out.
