The silence lasted for less than half a breath.
Du Cang didn’t shift his feet. He didn’t pull his arm back into a traditional practice draw. His right shoulder moved by perhaps a tiny fraction of an inch, his wrist twisting with the fluid, easy grace of water pouring from a jade pitcher.
The Sky-Severing Void Blade flashed forward in a level arc.
There was no ear-splitting sonic boom. There was no crackling blast of azure lightning or blazing bright fire. The dark, matte steel sliced through the empty mountain air with total, zero-drag silence. That left behind a razor-thin seam of pitch-black empty pocket that stayed in the air for a split second before collapsing under surrounding air pressure.
Lin Tao’s left eye tracked the flight path at twenty-four frames per second.
The strike was not aimed at them. It bypassed their promontory by fifty paces to the west, cutting horizontally through the upper shoulder of Peak Three. A massive pyramid of solid gray granite three thousand feet thick that had stood against mountain tempests since the dawn of the empire.
For forty-one split seconds, nothing happened. The mountain peak remained intact, the frost clinging to its ancient fissures undisturbed.
