The milk rose to Pei Jing’s collarbones. It was heavy as melted fat, and he could feel it lifting his ribs and hips. White light moved across the roof forty feet above him. The hanging stone looked like a row of frozen spears.
He opened his eyes. Before he drew any qi into his bones, he wanted to know how long he could stay.
The wedges held the ironwood door shut. The little air that moved through the chamber came from a warm fissure to the southeast. Steam bubbled there and kept the cave mild and damp. Above the pool, a drop gathered at the stone eye once every fourteen minutes. The milk in the basin had been building up for about five hundred years.
A True Disciple who earned Earth-Stalactite Milk usually received one small flask, about three ounces. The sect diluted it with ten parts snow-lotus dew and put an elder nearby with cooling needles. Even then the disciple might come down with stone fever as the marrow drew in the qi.
Pei Jing had forty-two gallons, his Five-Elemental Chaos Martial Root, and the bones he’d built in the mortal realms.
He remembered the boyhood that belonged to this body. The Peis had sent the boy to work in the Cloudford slaughter pens for one winter, before his cough grew worse and long before Pei Jing woke in the gutter. He remembered skinning hogs with fingers he could barely feel. His master struck his shins whenever the knife…
