Once the fire in Pei Jing’s marrow took hold, a white mist rose around his shoulders. It smelled of limestone, quartz, and winter cedar. Before long it filled the lowest five feet of the chamber.
The milk stayed cool at the rim, but the pool around his skin grew hot. His Chaos Root took heat from his body and turned it into pressure. The pressure drove earth qi into his bones.
A little over an hour passed.
The sharp pain gave way to a heavy hum. Under the pressure of Five-Phase Bone-Forging, the earth marrow coated the small arches inside his bones. It filled the spaces in the lattice and set there. Where his bones had been light and open like a frame of pine, they grew solid and heavy as cast bronze.
His thighs trembled against the bottom of the basin. Small ripples spread out from his knees.
An hour and forty-five minutes. He drew one slow breath every eight minutes. He let it out as a thin stream of steam. A butcher took apart a carcass one joint at a time. A clerk paid off a debt one coin at a time. He only had to hold the cycle for another quarter of an hour.
