The flame of the animal fat candle stood motionless in the dead, sulfur-heavy air of Cave 74.
On the bare slate slab, Pei Jing sat with his palms resting upwards on his thighs, his thumbs lightly touching the pads of his middle fingers. His spine was lined up with the total verticality of an iron land-mapper’s rod, anchored to the underground dark rock bedrock.
His breathing had ceased to be a spreading of the chest. It was a tiny shaking of his lower belly. Every fifteen seconds, a faint, rhythmic breath in drew the cold air of the cave through his nostrils, down his throat pipe, and into the deep blood-vessel network of his viscera.
Before initiating the final breath flow cycle, Pei Jing had performed his nightly upkeep ritual.
For forty minutes, he had sat before his father’s wooden spirit tablet on the wall ledge, working his hard dark metal cleaver across the wet stone-glass surface of the Black Mountain Whetstone.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
Ten passes forward, ten passes back. The repetitive, unrushed discipline had cleared his mind of market clutter, stripping away the noise of Butcher Tu’s shouting, the stench of leech bile. The lingering tension of being hunted through the cattails.
