The exhaust baffle shook as Pei Jing slipped out of Siphon Node Alpha. Forty-six thousand feet above the ground, he could feel the station through his gloves but could scarcely hear it. Chaos qi held his boots to the curved metal. Beyond the hull, the rising sun drew a white line along the edge of the Azure Continent.
He had gone four hundred yards when the Armored Nascent Soul stirred. Something heavy was coming down through the dark. He felt the change in its pull before he could see it.
Pei Jing moved into the shadow of a hull seam. He drank the bitter extract in a horn vial and drew the qi from twenty high-grade spirit stones without letting their light show. The Black Mountain Whetstone lay against his ribs. He had touched it before the climb to make sure it was still there.
He had practiced moving in thin air for months. A push here would send him turning until he found something else to push against. He kept one boot on the hull and waited for the object to come past.
The object came close enough for him to see its shape. It was a thirty-foot tube of sky brass with three rings turning around the middle. A crystal lens at the nose swept the hull. Purple light showed where the rings met.
