In the quiet second-story chamber of the stone keep, the stench of burning timber had faded into the cold, clean draft of falling mountain snow.
The room had been swept clean of Tie Mu’s wolf pelts and stolen silks. Pei Jing sat cross-legged on a single woven straw mat in the center of the flat stone slab floor, stripped to his coarse linen trousers.
Across his bare lap rested the ancient leather scroll of the Five-Viscera Turtle Respiration Scripture.
Beside the mat lay his traveling equipment: the twenty-two-pound Cloud-Splitter Cleaver, resting in its greased rawhide sheath. The box-shaped block of dense black dark rock—the Black Mountain Whetstone.
Pei Jing studied the body diagrams inked upon the scorched steer hide.
The theoretical boundary between the first five mortal realms and the sixth realm was total.
Skin could be beaten with wooden paddles, toughened by friction, and hardened against cuts. Flesh could be torn by physical hard effort and rebuilt denser through protein consumption. Tendons could be stretched, coiled, and conditioned into high-pulling living springs. Bones could be hammered into crystal-clear jade-iron matrices through stone nutrition and high-pressure shock.
All of those tissues were external load-bearing boundaries. They possessed stringy connective tissue sheaths, pain receptors, and dense cellular frameworks capable of enduring direct clockwork trauma.
