The stream of boiling aqua regia struck the pink coarse grey rock stone stand of the Sovereign Master builder with a violent, hissing roar.
The ancient stone, carved with twelve sky-high glyphs in the First Epoch, screamed under the heat shock. A thick cloud of choking, yellow-white nitrous gas billowed outward in an angry shroud, obscuring the base of the huge statue in skin-burning mist. Shards of hardened stone, shattered by the rapid heat swelling, pinged across the hard speckled rock floor flags like grape-shot.
Through the yellow fog lunged four shock-fighters from the Jade Court, their faces masked behind iron visors, their heavy spirit-broadswords blazing with green, toxic aura.
“Take the land-mapper!” their captain roared, his boots pounding across the wet pavers. “He has no armor! Cut his hamstrings!”
Qiao Ming did not step backward.
He stood in the center of the outward pavers, barefoot, his linen tunic damp with water drops, his salt-stiffened trousers tucked above his ankles. In his right hand, the sixty-fathom braided horsehair line was no longer a limp cord. It was a living extension of his own physical center, spinning in a whistling, level circle four inches above the floor.
At the end of that three-fathom radius, the twelve-pound six-sided lead sinker flew at eighty-four feet per second.
