The fifteen days that followed were governed by the ruthless mathematics of cold, water, and living rebuilding.
Every morning at the fourth watch, before the faint greyness of dawn touched the eastern crags, Pei Jing rose from his bed of dried cedar boughs. The surrounding air within the Dragon-Spine Ravine reached its nadir during those pre-dawn hours. He dropped to eighteen degrees below zero. On the rock floor of the nook, moisture from their evening breathing froze into brittle crystals of white rime that crackled like eggshells beneath his boots.
He didn’t light a fire before his morning full-body VR.
To heat the skin right away prior to entering a sub-zero clouded eye would create a heat differential that shocked the cardiovascular system. That triggered premature tiny blood vessel dilation and rapid heat loss. Instead, Pei Jing stripped down in the freezing dark. He wrapped his knees and elbows with freshly oiled leather cuffs to protect the joints against the scouring suspended silt.
Then, he walked barefoot down the fifty paces of frozen gravel into the plunge basin.
For the first seven days, the full-body VR had remained a brutal, desperate contest of load-bearing survival.
Every second under the torrent delivered thirty-two hundred foot-pounds of downward moving load. If his stance wavered by half a degree, the thirty tons of water crashing across his neck threatened to wrench his neck spine out of posture. His jade-iron bones bore the nonstop crushing weight without fracturing, but his surrounding musculature—the lower back…
