The eighth day of seclusion marked the arrival of the mortal ceiling.
Pei Jing had sat upon the black dark rock table for one hundred and sixty-eight hours without food, without water, and without drawing a single lung breath. Beneath his crossed shins, the rock slab was polished to a black glass sheen by the nonstop micro-shakes of his skeletal chassis. The lava river continued its slow, blazing bright crawl. But the surrounding heat—one hundred and sixty-six degrees—no longer produced the slightest living stress within his tissues.
At the second hour of the eighth day, a deep stillness dropped over his cellular stonework.
Inside the nuclei of his cells, telomeric degradation came to a total halt.
Every cellular division shortened the protective telomere caps at the ends of the chromosomes. When the telomeres exhausted their base pairs, cellular senescence began. Skin wrinkled, arteries hardened, muscles wasted away. The mortal vessel drifted toward certain living bankruptcy at sixty or seventy years of age. Even the greatest mortal generals of Great Yan, men who had commanded hundred-thousand-man armies, ended their days stooped, coughing blood, their joints swollen with inflammatory fluid.
Under the nonstop, metric consolidation of the Daily Accumulation Ledger, that living clock locked in place.
