In the three-thousand-foot depth of the fiery fault line, the final minute of the tenth day arrived.
Pei Jing sat upon the shattered dark rock slab. His fingers were locked around the boiled shark-skin grip of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
The black dark rock shelf beneath his pelvic bones was no longer solid rock. It had fragmented into a circular mosaic of cracked polygonal blocks, held together solely by the crushing gravity pull centering upon his lower navel. The sluggish river of orange magma forty feet below had ceased to flow. The molten rock had stopped its eastward crawl, pulled backward toward the rock island. It curled into a glowing, nested whirlpool of liquid fire that circled the base of his stone pillar.
Inside his lower belly, the Chaos Star-core crossed the critical thickness threshold.
One hundred thousand turns a minute. Five hundred thousand turns a minute. One million turns a minute.
The purple vortex, having burned up all five elemental currents, shrank from the size of a walnut to the width of a mustard seed. At that tiny scale, the repulsive magnetic forces between the five elements ceased to operate. The core lattices collapsed into direct nuclear closeness under fifteen million sea-weights of internal living pressure.
