White Snow spun the Storage Ring around her claw eighteen times.
The iron ring was still hot, hotter than before, as though someone had lit a fire underground and its lingering heat was rising through thirty feet of bluestone. She lay on a wooden table in a private room on the second floor of the Listening to the Tides Pavilion, her feathers puffed into a great white ball, her pointed beak pecking idly at the wood grain.
"Stop pecking. Keep that up and you'll punch a hole through the table." Han Yuwan pushed a plate of roasted spirit melon seeds toward her.
"I'm pecking at loneliness." White Snow did not even raise her head. "Those bastards wearing the Stars Pavilion's doghide-sooner or later, I'll give them another taste of my claws."
Ningyu sat by the window, holding a note folded into a square. Old Zhou had slipped it to her that afternoon. It contained only a few words: "Ancient Forest. Inheritance. Go at once."
"That handwriting looks like a chicken scratched it out." White Snow craned her neck for a look.
"Still better than yours," Ningyu said coolly. She waved the note above the candle flame, and a layer of pale silver markings surfaced on its reverse. "This isn't ordinary ink. It was written with star sand mixed with spirit beast blood. This Old Zhou is no ordinary man."
The Seventh Elder drew the Bronze Formation Disk from his robes and knocked it against the table's edge three times. An earthen-yellow glow spread across its surface. He rubbed the disk with the leather glove on his left hand, which was missing two fingers, muttering, "...The Qian position is three-tenths off, the Kun position has sunk seven inches. Someone tampered with Falling Star Harbor's earth veins, and not just a year