Before the pillar reached the summit, a great weight came down across the three continents. The descending figure sent the order ahead of him through the inner dome. The little taps on Alpha’s map answered the order all at once. Pei Jing felt the first pull in his marrow. The Dominion had left the same trace in the land, the rain, and everything that took its strength from them. The old intake used it to draw qi out a little at a time. The Extraction Mandate used it to take everything at once.
Across Great Yan, people dropped hoes, hammers, and spindles. A farmer fell beside the row he’d just sown and clutched his chest. In Cangzhou, a village elder put his forehead into the mud.
“The heavens are angry,” he cried. “We failed our ancestors. The gods are taking back our breath.”
In the caves below the old Cloud Mist headquarters, elders who had escaped the fall of the sect dragged themselves out into the light. They felt their cores beating against their ribs.
“It’s drawing again,” one said. His skin drew tight across his jaw. “The seven beams are gone. This pull feels different.”
At the new docks downriver from old Cloudford, a sixteen-year-old smith stood at his anvil. The judge was screaming in the courtyard next door. The boy put his feet in the stance he’d learned from the Deliberate Sweat Manual and took up his eight-pound hammer. His shoulders felt as if he’d put a sack…
