The light in the prow cannon rose until it washed the shadows off three ranges. Pei Jing had felt it gathering. While the ship brought its rings up to speed, he drew the last hundred and fifty high-grade spirit stones in his own wartime reserve. These were the last of the five hundred he’d set aside at Ice-Fang from the Alliance flagship salvage. He’d spent a hundred holding back the first draw, fifty in the northern trench and two hundred crossing the galleons’ fire. The Alliance’s stocks were separate. His own stones went dark around him. The charge joined what he had already put into the Armored Soul on the mountain.
He put the blade and whetstone into marrow storage.
Then the cannon fired.
A five-ton ball of white fire came out of the muzzle. Three rings of light held it together. Blue lines spread across the air ahead of it. Pei Jing looked up through them and let the last seal on his dantian open.
“Wake up,” he said.
The nine-inch soul rose out of him. It grew to thirty feet, then a hundred. Beyond the height he had managed at the fold disaster, the old seams started to open. He pushed it to three hundred feet just long enough to put both hands between the shot and the mountain. It took the last of the reserve. A plate tore across the left shoulder, and the pain came through to his own arm. The plates of its armor came…
