On the eighth day, the shooting stopped long enough for him to hear the slow beat in his dantian.
The gold at the center of the pillars was the size of an apple. It could hold a great deal of qi, but it still hung in his Dantian like a separate thing.
In the old methods, that was what a finished core was supposed to do. If a cultivator’s body took a fatal wound, the core might survive. Some masters tried to leave their bodies and take another one. Pei Jing had spent too many years making his bones and muscles what they were to build a core he might one day have to carry away from them.
He took one slow breath and opened the marrow seals at the base of his spine.
A hum spread through his bones. He felt it in his thighs and along his ribs. The gold-red marrow he had refined over years of daily work stirred, then flowed toward his Dantian under the guidance of the Five-Elemental Chaos Spirit Root.
It met the spinning pillars with a hiss. Pei Jing thought of the forge, where the Saint marrow had settled between the iron and dragon bone. The pillars took in his living marrow just as readily. A thin layer of bone grew over their faces. Threads finer than spider silk branched into the gold and carried blood to the center of the core.
