The fourth beat of his breath out ended in the clearing steam of the storeroom. Then, Seyun slowly lowered his right hand from the front of the cast-iron stove and released the back of Lorn’s leather belt with his left.
At the same moment, the semi-clear, half-inch mantle of pale amber-white heat above his palms and fingers drew smoothly back into the Laogong sky-slits at the centers of his hands, vanishing beneath the lime-cracked skin like a lamp-flame drawn cleanly down into a trimmed wick.
For one long, silent breath, nobody in the narrow six-foot aisle spoke. Mina, Ilyra, and old Mother Renn all watching Seyun’s bare, green-paste-streaked torso to see whether the pullback of the external mantle would be followed by the sudden, hollow collapse or blood-cough of a forced and unstable realm crossing.
It wasn’t.
Inside Seyun’s chest, the cultivated breath didn’t drop back into the slow, skin-bound smolder of the Late Coal realm, nor did it press with a single ounce of stray backwash against the hardened white winter scar across his fourth right rib.
Instead, as he drew his next ordinary breath in of the steam-and-bitter pine-resin-scented air, the six braided circuits continued turning smoothly and effortlessly on their own power. Rising from his lower dantian to his solar nerve web, curving ninety degrees to the left through the permanently widened between-rib bypass beside his breastbone, crossing the bridge of his shoulders, flowing down through the open projection gates of his wrists and palms, and returning…
