Cold crushing pressure seized Lu Chen as the chest vault of the River Mother Disaster clamped shut like an iron vice.
Pitch-black river salt water, chilled far below freezing by hundreds of years of piled up resentment, pressed against his skin with the weight of twenty deep-water lengths of standing water.
Every cubic inch of the inside was alive, choking, and dense with rotting organic matter.
This was not an open belly.
It was a body maze of knotted drowned corpses, tightly packed into a singular, writhing mass of rotting muscle.
Ages of drowned peasants, sunken river barge crews, and royal levy soldiers were woven together by thick cords of black river moss and hardened tendon chokes.
Pale, waterlogged arms jutted from the pulsing walls of meat, fingers twitching in blind spasms as they sought warmth.
To an ordinary mortal martial artist, the pressure alone would have collapsed the lungs within three seconds.
