Four war chariots came through the cloud deck in a diamond. Each was thirty paces long. Brass plates covered the hardwood hulls. Two spirit turbines drove each vessel, leaving white trails in the dark. Above each bow floated an iron cauldron. Golden light streamed out of it and wrapped the hull.
Patriarch Xuan stood on the lead deck in purple silk. An ivory crown held his white hair, and a five-foot bronze sword hung at his back. Behind him stood the other Nascent Soul patriarchs of the Grand Heavenly Alliance. Chen came from the True Void Pavilion, Ling from Nine-River Hall, and Mo from the Iron Sword Bastion.
The Divine Cloud Sect kept the regional gauges for the Grand Heavenly Alliance. Its surveyors had set their lowest pegs on the mountain early in Pei Jing’s first winter. When he cut the rock called Little Split Needle, the surveyors withdrew, and the Alliance marked the range unsafe and stayed away for the rest of his eighteen years there. Then the fortune-telling basins in the lowlands began to boil. In five thousand years of records, the Alliance had found only three trials with eighty-one bolts. Every one had ended with a great relic coming to light or an old demon dying in the strike.
