The underground dark rock slab was an island of cold black stone suspended within a lake of fire.
Beneath the five-foot rock shelf, the river of molten lava crept forward at four inches per minute, sluggish and glowing with a dull, blazing bright orange heat. Bubbles of tightly packed fiery gas—sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and white-hot steam—rose from the thick, sticky magma. It stretched until their blazing bright skins burst with muffled, hollow detonations that sprayed flakes of black fiery glass into the air. Along the upright cave walls eighty feet above, veins of native copper and crystal-clear sulfur gleamed like molten gold in the underground gloom.
Pei Jing sat motionless in the full lotus stance.
His bare skin, coated in the yellow sulfur powder from Su Mei’er’s apothecary jar, was bone-dry. In a surrounding heat of one hundred and sixty-two degrees, human sweat couldn’t collect in droplets. It flashed into micro-vapor the instant it emerged from the sweat glands. It formed a pale, trembling boundary layer around his limbs that distorted the red light of the lava.
His lung breathing was fully dead.
The glottis was clamped shut like a bronze gate valve. His chest cage was locked in a locked-muscle brace that locked still every rib muscle. Through the cutaneous pores of his arms, shoulders, and scalp, his outer tiny blood vessels absorbed the trace oxygen diffused through the cave’s sulfur haze. This was the true Turtle Breathing (Gui Xi) of the pre-dynastic martial texts. Not the shallow…
