Wind came clean out of the northwest on Mount Qilian. Below the ridge, the River Luo shone between dark fields. A few lights were still burning in the farm villages.
He set a fresh sheet of parchment on a flat rock and weighted the corners with iron. The two halves of Yan Wu’s white jade token still rang when he held them close together. Breaking the jade had stopped it from marking a bearer as exempt. The fine marks in each half could still hear the call from above.
Pei Jing pressed his palms around the pieces and sent his senses into the quartz below him. Every twelve seconds a heavy pulse went through the rock. The jade answered on a low note each time. He followed that note out along the faults and wrote down where it grew stronger.
One line reached the cold water veins under Ice-Fang Ridge. Another led to the heat beneath Mount Cangmang. A third passed through the living silt of Dragon-Tail Delta, and the fourth drew from the metal veins below the Sandfall Desert. Each line ended in a spire.
Three other branches went into the sea. He marked the Black Current trench in the east, the Whistling Depths in the south and the Subpolar Void Chasm in the north. They drew pressure away from the land lines and gave the upper array somewhere to send any load the spires could not bear.
