Seven pillars of red light fell from the lower emitter forty thousand feet above the ground. Four struck anchor spires on land. Three went into the deep ocean. Each was half a mile across. At the bottom of each beam, the air began to rush upward.
The rivers lost mist first. Clouds followed. Then came the qi.
In the halls of the Heavenly Sword Sect, an elder pitched forward onto his sandalwood desk. He had spent two hundred years filling his dantian. Now the method he had used to draw qi in gave the beam a way to pull it out. Golden vapor rose through his sleeves and streamed out over the courtyard. He tried to seal his spirit veins. The vapor kept coming. By the time a student reached the desk, his hair had begun to fall out.
Other sects felt the same pull. At Azure Cloud, students dropped their swords on the palace stairs. In Blood Spirit’s valley, men who had sworn their roots could never fail crawled out of their pavilions and fell in the dirt. Across Great Yan, court nobles tore at the collars of their robes while the sky drew the warmth from their bodies.
