The seventh day needed the consumption of stone.
At one hundred and forty-four hours of seclusion, Pei Jing opened his eyes. The bronze rings encircling his corneas caught the dull crimson flare of the underground lava river. It reflected two steady points of amber light into the dark cave. Outside his rock island, the sulfur smoke coiled in heavy, yellow wreaths against the dark rock ceiling. Meanwhile, the river of molten rock hissed and burped with titanic deep-rock pressure.
He reached to his right, picking up the wooden box lined with black sheep’s wool.
Inside lay the three-hundred-year-old cold iron root.
The gnarled rhizome was the thickness of his forearm, dark as graphite, and cold as river ice despite being surrounded by one-hundred-and-sixty-degree air for seven days. When he lifted it from the fleece, its mass was staggering. Twelve royal jin of dense, stone-hardened vegetable matter impregnated with native magnetic iron, chromium, and trace silver-steel. It didn’t smell of forest loam. It smelled of deep earth-shaking dark rock and cold, unbending metal.
An ordinary human stomach system could no more process this rhizome than it could digest an iron cannonball.
Human gastric acid possessed a pH between one point five and three point five—capable of breaking down animal proteins and soft starches, but wholly inert against crystal-clear magnetic iron matrices. A mortal attempting to swallow an ounce of this root would have suffered severe esophageal deep cuts. It was followed by clockwork blocked path of the stomach and death from…
