The potion-made spirit-needle did not leave Zhu Heling’s fingers with the whistling flight of an arrow.
It was propelled by a hidden, spring-loaded bronze sleeve-injector mounted upon his right forearm. A weapon forged by the master artificers of the Jade Court to execute silent assassinations in the presence of sky emperors. When the Scholar tripped the hair-trigger with his thumb, the four-inch needle of star-fallen dragon-bone erupted from the sleeve with an instant speed of one hundred and forty feet per second.
The needle trailed a thin, emerald ribbon of boiled away viper-venom that hissed as it cut through the cold air of the Round hall.
The flight path was total.
Thirty paces across the open hard speckled rock floor, Yan Zhiqiu was stepping forward from behind the coarse grey rock stone stand of the Master builder, her short horn bow lowered. Her left hand held the Broken Slate upright before her ribs. She was an experienced scout, her senses sharpened by years of surviving on the run. But no human reflex could raise a bow or pivot a stone slab in the twelve hundredths of a second it took for the dragon-needle to cross that distance.
She saw the emerald flash. She saw the needle’s needle-point bearing directly upon the center of her throat.
