The fourth day of seclusion began with the dry, brittle sound of cracking charcoal.
Pei Jing had not shifted his position on the black dark rock table for seventy-two in a row hours. His shins, crossed tightly in the lotus lock, were anchored to the stone. His spine rose straight as an iron rod into the swirling sulfur fog. The surrounding air heat had climbed by two degrees, hovering at one hundred and sixty-four degrees as a deeper earth-shaking surge pulsed through the magma river below.
Across his entire body, the outer integument had ceased to look like human skin.
It had become a rigid, blackened back shell. The outer skin layer, repeatedly scorched by heat-rising heat, soaked with fiery sulfur powder, and starved of cutaneous rich fat secretions during Turtle Breathing, had dehydrated into a brittle shell one point five tiny fractions of an inch thick. It was cracked in a sharp-angled pattern of dry hexagons, resembling the mud bed of an ancient lakebed baked by drought.
Every micro-movement of his ribs created a sharp, rustling rasp.
In Master Chixiao’s silk scroll, Day Four had been named the Furnace of the Flayed:
> “By the fourth sunrise, the outer skin turns to black charcoal. If the fighter moves, the burnt hide tears away the living flesh beneath. It exposed raw red muscle tissue to the sulfur poison. Eleven of my companions died screaming on this day, their blood oozing through cracked scabs until infection turned their muscles into rotting…
