The eighth day of intent training coincided with the arrival of the Great Northern Gale—a polar air mass dropping directly from the frozen ice-slow peaks of the Arctic Rim.
At noon, the sun was fully blotted out by a roaring ceiling of pewter clouds that scraped the castle walls of Fort Ironpass. The wind screamed through the stone embrasures at sixty feet per second. It drove flakes of granular ice that stripped the paint from the timber siege cranes and froze spit into solid crystals upon the lips in two seconds.
On the highest exposed castle wall of the northern curtain wall, forty feet above the trench floor, Pei Jing stood alone.
He was stripped of his heavy wolf-pelt mantle. Over his linen undergarments he wore only his plain charcoal-grey robe. Its hem was tied securely around his knees with leather thongs to eliminate flapping wind-cutting drag.
His bare forearms were exposed to thirty-two degrees below zero.
Yet his skin was neither blue nor trembling with the shivering reflex. Beneath the outer skin, his blood-vessel networks were engorged with high-pressure, dense Qi-Blood. His Five-Viscera living fire had reached steady-state heat balance. His Spleen absorbed the fiery heat of his Heart, filtering the circulating volume into heavy, hardened liquid iron before distributing it into his upper-arm and outward arteries.
