On the ninth day of seclusion, the heart stopped.
At one hundred and ninety-two hours upon the dark rock table, Pei Jing’s pulse ceased its rapid, drum-like rhythm. The blood pressure, which had hovered at four hundred tiny fractions of an inch of liquid silver for a week, didn’t drop to zero in a deathly collapse. It locked.
Inside his heart-sac, the myocardial fibers tightened once every sixty seconds.
THUMP.
It was a solitary, underground report. A sound like a massive bronze war hammer striking an iron anvil wrapped in wet bull-hide. The blast shook through the dark rock slab, traveled through the earth-shaking fault line. Then it caused the sluggish surface of the lava river to shudder in nested ripples.
Sixty seconds of complete stillness followed.
Zero sound. Zero blood flow. The dense, high-thickness Crimson-Gold star-fire sat motionless within the blood channels, held under locked-muscle tension by the muscular tunica media of his vessels. His brain stem, soaked with the current-carrying liquid silver marrow of Day Six, functioned with crystal-clear clarity in the absence of nonstop heart cycling.
Then, sixty seconds later:
