Pei Jing had just enough time to draw the Black Mountain Whetstone from its pouch and into the hidden space in his marrow. Then the eyes in the rift fired.
White fire came down in a column fifty yards wide. The ledges, the frozen pools and the veins of iron went from stone to vapor in less than a heartbeat. The blast cut the center out of the summit. The slopes on either side buckled, and a wave of heat ran through the broken layers before they could fall into the hole. The upper thousand feet of Sky-Piercing Peak rose into the sky as a cloud of glowing grit and glass.
Across the plains, night turned to noon for three seconds. Watchmen in the border towns covered their eyes. The needles of the great gauges in the Divine Cloud Sect snapped, and roof tiles fell from farmhouses as far away as the next province.
Where the summit had stood, a basin two hundred paces across filled with white-hot magma.
Pei Jing stood at its center with his legs in the liquid stone. The beam had burned away his boots, belt and trousers. The skin around his shins had turned black and hard. Beneath it the Water phase drew heat away from his muscles, while Earth let his bones bear more weight.
