The pill melted on Pei Jing’s tongue. It felt like warm honey and cold rain at once.
Then it caught fire.
Heat poured down his throat. In less than three seconds his stomach went from thirty-seven degrees to more than two hundred and forty. The dragon marrow in the pill had woken. An ordinary cultivator’s stomach would have burst.
Pei Jing kept his knees against the stone and his palms turned up on his thighs. Years of training had thickened the lining of his stomach. The energy he’d taken in from the dragon meat met the first wave of heat and gave his body a chance to turn it into pressure.
A low hum began in his belly.
Liver, heart, spleen, lungs, and kidneys moved together. Wood fed fire, fire made earth, earth bore metal, metal condensed water, and water nourished wood. His spleen took most of the heat. Wood qi carried the pill’s power through his body before it could clot. Metal qi cooled the steam that rose toward his lungs.
The Five-Elemental Chaos Root drew the hot flow through the spleen’s channels and into his lower dantian. The eighty-one drops turned at the bottom of a whirl of gray-gold mist. The pill’s heat drove the pressure up.
