By the twenty-fifth day under the Dragon-Spine Cascade, a deep winter thaw had settled over the lower foothills. It sent dense blankets of warm fog crawling up through the canyon.
In the high ravine, however, the heat remained locked at twelve degrees below zero. The meeting of warm valley air with the sub-zero ice-slow melt generated an unending, blinding mist that filled the deep gap from rim to riverbed. The clear sight had shrunk to less than fifteen paces. Fifty paces beyond the rock nook, the roaring clouded eye was invisible, announcing its presence only through the nonstop physical shaking of the stone.
Pei Jing stood anchored beneath the deluge, forty minutes into his second hour of full-body VR.
His eyes were closed. His bare feet gripped the underwater dark rock shelf, his toes wedged firmly into the rock clefts that had become his daily anvil.
For twenty-four days, the hydro-moving hammer had battered his outside. Meanwhile, the internal standing wave scoured his inside marrow canals. But today, the body experience had crossed into uncharted territory.
The sensation was no longer a dull ache or a rhythmic shaking.
It was an intense, searing internal burning.
It began deep within the bone shaft of his femurs. It spread rapidly through his pelvis, up his lower-back bones. Across the twelve pairs of ribs that caged his chest organs. His marrow ignited into liquid phosphorus, burning at hundreds of degrees within the cold jade walls of his outer-brain bone.
