Deep in the earth, the underground crypt groaned like a dying beast.
Slabs of black glacier ice, three feet thick and weighing hundreds of stones, detached from the ceiling vault and shattered against the frozen ground floor.
Lu Chen sat cross-legged on the stone dais, amidst the bubbling pool of melted frost-fiend marrow.
His internal heat remained pegged at a lethal one hundred and fifty degrees.
Every breathing vented jets of white-hot gas that hissed wildly against the freezing air.
Beneath his skin, the thirty-six main Asura channels pulsed with blazing bright crimson light.
His backup spirit veins were smoking, hardening rapidly into brittle black glass melted rock waste under the total fire backlash.
In the mortal human body, vessels were evolved to circulate warm blood and gentle breath, not thousands of degrees of purified fire heat.
