Pei Jing set his feet apart. His heels sank into the black rock. He lowered his hips into the first stance of Mountain-Cleaving Fist.
At sixteen he had stood in mud behind the West Pavilion with his left arm in a sling. Aunt Fang’s porridge had warmed his belly. He had left three coppers in a row on the whetstone. The stance pulled at his broken collarbone until he learned to let the muscles in his back take the strain. He had stayed there.
“That’s a foot soldier’s stance,” the Judge said.
In Cloudford the ditch workers used it when a shovel couldn’t break a clod of frozen ground. Pei Jing let his left hand come up as he had that morning, then drew his right fist back. The rock took his weight without a sound.
