The violent shivering set in forty seconds after Pei Jing reached the dry cedar bedding.
It wasn’t a conscious tremor. It was an automatic body convulsion, the body’s body defense gearwork firing every striated muscle fiber at the same time to generate body-energy friction. His teeth clicked together like bone dice in a gambler’s cup. His chest muscle muscles locked in hard, cramping knots that threatened to tear their sternal attachments.
“Don’t fight the tremor with locked breath,” Cheng Shan commanded, his voice urgent over the muffled roar of the waterfall outside the rock nook.
The scout threw a heavy clay jug directly into the glowing charcoal. The jug was filled with rendered bear animal fat mixed with crushed pine pitch and turpentine oil. Within moments, the oil hissed and bubbled, streaming a pungent, pine-scented heat.
Cheng Shan dipped a thick wad of coarse, raw, unwhitened hemp linen into the hot animal fat. Wringing the excess back into the pot with tongs, he pressed the steaming cloth directly against the sides of Pei Jing’s neck, covering the main neck blood vessels.
The heat was blistering, yet Pei Jing’s frozen skin barely registered the burn.
Instead, the heat energy pierced through the thin epidermal layers, directly heating the blood surging toward his brain stem.
