On the eighth morning of his solitary mountain seclusion, the high peaks awoke under a sky of blinding, crystal-clear cobalt.
The heat at seven thousand feet stood at twenty-six degrees below zero. The air was thin, cold, and razor-sharp. He carried less than sixty percent of the air pressure found in the river valleys below. At this height, an ordinary mortal laborer would experience height sickness, lung constriction, and violent headaches within two hours.
Pei Jing felt no discomfort.
His crimson-gold blood, circulating through heavy gut-deep vessels at twenty-eight beats per minute, bound the scarce oxygen molecules with fourfold living affinity. His tidal breathing remained slow, shallow, and fully silent.
He climbed along the knife-edge ridge of the Great Glacial Col. A narrow bridge of fractured black flaky rock connecting the northern massif of Mist Peak to the jagged precipices of Thunder-Crag.
To his right, the mountain dropped three thousand feet into the cloud-filled void of the northern steppes. To his left, the sheer granite walls of the Dragon-Spine Ravine plunged into shadowed depths.
Pei Jing had traveled to this high col to harvest a specific living spark.
Thirty paces ahead, clinging to the underside of a frost-shattered granite top stone ledge, bloomed a cluster of five-petaled Snow Lotuses.
