Seyun didn’t snatch his fingers back from Halin’s ribs, because snatching his hand away would have scared the boy on the mattress, but for two full breaths his shoulders locked and the healed burns across his palms throbbed as if he had pressed them back against Osen’s iron fire bowl. Beneath Halin’s thin skin, the silver wire was conducting a pressure that didn’t travel in a single line. It moved like five distinct mountain rivers braided into a single dark canyon. Each current carrying a different martial angle, a different age of memory, and a different load-bearing law, yet held together by an overarching will that refused to let them tear one another apart.
“Easy,” Mina murmured from the opposite side of the bed, her fingers still resting on Halin’s left wrist blood vessel. “Seyun, your own neck pulse just jumped. Breathe from your heels before you listen any deeper.”
Seyun let out a slow breath out through his nose. He dropped his balance point into the kneeling stance of Ash Reed’s first base form. He wasn’t trying to fight the bronze pillar, and he wasn’t trying to draw its power into his own channels. Still, the sheer scale of what was passing through a sixteen-year-old boy’s chest made his stomach tighten.
