In the pitch-black silence twenty feet beneath the ice-slow avalanche pack, time lost its chronological markers.
There was no day, no night, no passage of wind, no sound. The crushing lithic pressure of four hundred thousand tons of compacted ice and crushed stone had locked the mountain into an unbending, frozen stillness.
Any ordinary mortal martial artist—even an expert who had reached the pinnacle of skin, flesh, and bone conditioning—would have perished within five minutes of burial.
Freezing sickness would have seized the heart within thirty minutes, cooling the blood to slush and inducing fatal heart flutter. The absence of lung air would have triggered carbon dioxide acidosis, convulsions, and permanent outer-brain black rot within three hundred heartbeats.
Pei Jing didn’t perish.
For four days and four nights, he remained entombed within the blue ice.
His living state was not life as mortals understood it. Nor was it death. It was the total, suspended balance of the Stone Tortoise.
His heart beat once every ten seconds: six high-pressure contractions per minute.
