Something foreign had come through the cracks the storm had left. Pei Jing felt it reach for a memory.
He kept his grip on the Astral Bone Blade and turned his attention inward. The old manuals pictured the mind as a lake or a palace. Pei Jing had spent enough of his life in counting rooms that he pictured rows of walnut desks. Leather books lay in stacks on each one. One stack held the names of the people who had raised him. Another held the movements he no longer had to think about.
Above the books from his seventeenth year, six black marks hung in the air. They moved on thin legs like spiders. He had turned aside the Watchers’ needles, but pieces of the runes on their chains had come in with the flash when the chains broke.
Black threads reached down toward the books. Pei Jing saw a page begin to bend toward one of them.
A voice spoke inside the room.
Mortal vessel. Acknowledge what you owe. Your breath is leased. Your marrow is borrowed. Your soul belongs to the Grand Heavenly Registry. Receive the seal and settle the debt.
Pei Jing called the Armored Martial Soul up from his Dantian.
