In the Late Coal realm, no matter how hot a fighter’s blood ran or how tightly he packed the twelve minor collateral branches of his torso and limbs, his cultivated breath remained strictly imprisoned inside the boundary of his own skin.
Had Seyun thrust his bare hands beneath three gallons of boiling water and falling willow-coals ten minutes earlier, the scalding sheet would have struck unshielded human flesh, splashed straight off his palms into his own face and chest. Then he cooked the skin and tendons of his forearms to the bone.
Now, however, as his ninety-degree pivot carried fourteen-year-old Lorn clear behind his left hip and his unbroken four-count breath in turned smoothly over into breath out, all six braided circuits of the seventh-dawn echo arrived together at the Laogong gates in the centers of his palms.
They didn’t arrive as a scattered, panicked burst of force, nor did a single thread of their pressure recoil backward against the hardened white winter scar on his fourth right rib.
Because he had kept his breath nonstop while turning his body’s route around a living person—honoring in a six-foot storeroom the exact load-bearing law by which Ilyra’s spear had crossed into Early Bronze on the water gate bridge—the final kernel of the Bronze echo recognized its own nature and locked all six increments into a single, seamless, self-turning ring from his solar nerve web, through his widened left between-rib bypass, across his shoulders, and out through his wrists.
