Four inches of freezing mud covered the bottom of the trench. Pei Jing lay half sunk in it, pinned by the basalt across his hips. The weight would have crushed an ordinary man’s pelvis. To his tempered bones, it was a load he could bear. That let him leave his muscles loose.
Turtle Breathing had taken him into the Suspended Vessel state. His chest lay flat and still. His heart gave one faint stroke, then went quiet for three minutes. The fire in his marrow went low, and warmth drained into the stone below him. His skin took on the gray-purple cast of a body that had been lying there half an hour.
The Ledger recorded the change.
The light held for two seconds and faded. His left eye was still half open. Grit stung it, but he kept looking at the same scrap of stone three inches from his nose. A burned arm lay in the sludge beside his cheek. The blood he’d smeared on his collar blended with what ran down from the hall. The Black Mountain Whetstone was hard against his hip.
“Yan,” Ling Feiyu called. “How many survived?”
“None from the vanguard, Senior Brother. The chain took the whole arc. Thirty-one gone. The dais is clear.”
