The morning after the movement test, Pei Jing spread his horsehide mat behind a basalt outcrop. He opened his tunic and sat with his back straight in the cold wind. With the soul’s help, he traced the flow through his seventy-two main spirit veins.
The Ren and Du vessels held. They ran cleanly through the front of his body and along his spine. The trouble was farther out. He counted forty-two small breaks in the branches around his lungs and spleen. The spatial bolts had cut them during the second volley. Wood qi had closed the larger wounds, but these fine cracks were still there.
At rest, he could barely feel them. During the Shrinking Earth Stride, the extra current caught against their edges. Two parts in a hundred of his strength went into heating the tissue around them. Left alone, the cracks would widen. He set a slate on his knee and wrote down where he had found each one.
He fetched his cast-iron pot and filled it with water from the northern tarn, well below the part of the summit that the trial had taken. Into it went the sealed two-ounce dose of five-hundred-year star-stone marrow he’d kept apart from his cooking stock and a pinch of white-tendon moss from the high ice. The marrow smelled faintly of pine when he took it out of storage.
