The blood dripping from Lin Ke’s torn right arm didn’t hit the stone.
It stopped six inches below his knuckles, hanging in mid-air as a tiny crimson sphere. Then the color drained from it. That turned the red droplet into a solid gray pebble of frozen marrow.
The air didn’t merely cool. It died.
All sound—the crackle of the smelting fires, the whistling mountain wind, the distant clanging of distress bells—ceased in an instant. A choking, leaden stillness dropped over the peak, so dense and heavy that the pressure inside Lin Ke’s ears popped like thin paper.
High above the Seventh Ward, the storm clouds parted in a neat, exact circle five miles across.
A huge spirit presence looked down through the sky-slit. It wasn’t a physical giant, but a huge projection of pure, crystal-hardened will: the calm, high-born face of Grand Elder Feng Xuan, wrought from swirling gray mist and ancient, unbending script.
The eyes of the projection didn’t look at Zong’s shattered arm, nor at the corpses of the fallen students. They looked through the mountain as if it were drawn on cheap rice paper.
The lips of the sovereign parted. A single word dropped, whispered with cosmic indifference:
