The second damaged jade slip had nearly killed three rogue fighters before it reached Pei Jing’s hands.
In the quiet chill of Cave 74, Pei Jing sat stripped to the waist, cross-legged on the slate slab. He held the dark slate slip of the Iron Skin Barrier across his palms.
He didn’t rush the breath flow. He closed his eyes, examining the load-bearing defect that had caused its last owners to cough up their lung tissue.
The flaw lay in the shift between the spleen and the heart spirit vein.
A fighter channeled surrounding Earth-Qi through their dantian to harden the skin boundary. Then, the formula directed the dense, stone-heavy spiritual energy along the central chest axis. In the defective slip, the energy had no diversionary vortex. It slammed into the heart sinus at an acute ninety-degree angle. That set off a severe high-pressure water-hammer effect against the heart wall.
To a traditional fighter whose internal organs were soft and unaccustomed to physical trauma, that impact burst chest tiny blood vessels within seconds, inducing violent coughing, blood spasms, and internal hemorrhaging.
Pei Jing didn’t have soft organs.
In the second and third mortal martial realms—Flesh Forging and Viscera Refinement—he had subjected his internal cavities to iron-sand pounding, breath squeezing, and deep internal shaking. His heart wall was dense as cured ox-leather. His chest arteries were lined with elastic smooth muscle capable of withstanding huge blood-pressure spikes.
