Pei Jing opened his eyes. Two beams of violet-white light reached across the crater and struck the broken wall forty paces away. Dust shone in their path. He could see the separate grains of quartz in the rock.
He blinked. The beams went out. A fine ring of gold remained around each iris.
For three breaths he sat and listened. His heart struck once every three and a third seconds. Eighteen beats a minute. The ache he’d carried in his joints had gone. He could hear the wind half a mile down the ravine and the drops of thawing frost twenty paces from the cave. The air held traces of ozone, sulfur, and wet peat.
He bent his fingers. The last scraps of burned skin split and fell away from his shoulders and forearms. More dropped from his legs as he stood. The skin beneath had a pale bronze sheen, smooth as horn and as tough as cured leather. An old scar along his right ribs had faded into the new tissue. He pressed a nail into his forearm. The skin gave a little and sprang back without a mark.
He looked inward.
The crystal platform fed astral Gang Qi to every part of him. It could repair wear that ordinary bodies had to carry into old age. As a Martial Saint, his Ledger had projected about a hundred and eighty years of vigor. The new foundation raised his total lifespan estimate to two hundred and fifty years.
