Midnight brought no abatement to the mountain storm.
Outside the cave, the blizzard raged with earth-shaking fury. It drove shards of granular ice horizontally against the granite face of the Mist Peak. Inside the cave, the heat of the birch-wood embers fought a silent war against the creeping frost that rimmed the smoke vent.
Pei Jing sat cross-legged upon a flat slab of black flaky rock, stripped to his trousers.
The transformation had begun three hours past midnight, announced not by a flare of external heat, but by a sound phenomenon.
Deep within his skeletal frame, a sound was building. It wasn’t the creak of strained joints or the snap of popping joint padding. It was an underground deep ring. A high-hum, metal hum that sounded like a tuning fork struck in a sealed bronze chamber.
The four point two pounds of panther spinal marrow had been fully broken down by his gastric enzymes. The packed silver-veined minerals, carried by a sped up blood-flow torrent, were bombarding the osteological structures of all two hundred and six bones in his body.
The agony was total, cold, and total.
Ordinary bone growth was a gradual process of cellular settling taking years of childhood nourishment. This was a forced recrystallization under extreme bio-energetic pressure.
