The nine-inch silver-steel infusion hollow tube punched through the tough, stringy joint padding of Titus’s ventral belly shell with a sharp, high-pressure hiss that was instantly swallowed by the ear-splitting roar of the collapsing cave.
Under sixty bars of air-powered pressure from the portable razor-sharp air pump, four hundred drops of hyper-dense Abyssal Basalt Mineral Slurry, chelated with packed Xuanwu old family marrow catalysts, surged directly into the tortoise’s main blood-vessel nerve web.
The body reaction was instant, violent, and terrifying.
Titus’s massive body went fully rigid on the trembling stone bridge. His leathery neck extended to its full length. His beak opened in a silent, painful gasp as his internal core heat spiked from a baseline thirty-eight degrees to a blazing bright twelve hundred degrees in the span of six seconds.
Beneath the gunmetal-gray surface of his sixteen-ton dark rock back shell, a web of glowing, cherry-red fault lines erupted. The thick six-sided armor scales didn’t crack. They swelled, their crystal-clear atom-deep structure absorbing the liquid stone catalysts and reorganizing into a dense, linked carbon-iron-hard metal lattice. Thick plumes of white-hot sulfur steam hissed from the breathing pores along his belly shell rim, obscuring the bridge in a blinding white fog that smelled of ancient stone and elemental ozone.
