For three seconds after the jade broke, Qi Shenxiao stood still. Then his armor began to melt from the inside.
The white gold turned clear in patches. Pei Jing could see through it to the dark shape at the center. No flesh moved behind the plates. A small star spun inside a cage of magnetic runes. The court had made it a body and taught it to speak.
“You destroyed the property of the court.”
The sound came from the fire itself. Dust blew off the plateau. The nine remaining disks folded into the Judge’s back and melted. His outline rose from ten feet to twenty-four. The edges of the armor disappeared. Two blue-white eyes remained in a pillar of flame.
The glass around him turned orange and ran into the cracks. Six paces away, Pei Jing’s iron pot melted. The clay bowl broke. His pen went up in ash. The Black Mountain Whetstone glowed red along one edge and kept its shape.
The Astral Bone Blade stood where he had planted it. Pei Jing drew some of the heat away from the slab beneath the whetstone and the strip of glass around the point. He could not do the same for the whole plateau. He let the stone run past him on either side.
