By Day 50 under the Dragon-Spine Cascade, the high alpine winter had entered its deepest, most hostile phase.
A howling blizzard swept down from the polar ice caps. It wrapped the entire gorge in a five-foot crust of blue ice. The roaring clouded eye was half-frozen. Massive, crystal-clear drapes of ice sixty feet high framed the central column of falling water, transforming the plunge basin into a cathedral of semi-clear, pale blue glass.
Inside that icy tomb, Pei Jing stood unmoving beneath the falling hammer.
The surrounding heat was twenty-two degrees below zero. The water crashing onto his bare shoulders was dense with slush and needle-sharp ice shards that tore at the air with a shrill, whistling hiss.
Yet Pei Jing felt neither pain nor cold.
His washed bone marrow had reached a state of neural and body integration that went beyond mortal sense thresholds.
The main benefit of the fifth tier of Nine-Turn Marrow Washing was not merely physical health. It was the radical optimization of his central and outer nervous systems.
The brain, main spine nerve, and skull nerves were the most oxygen-dependent tissues in the human organism. For fifty days, Pei Jing’s washed marrow had flooded his brain breath flow with crimson-gold blood carrying four times the normal oxygen volume, fully free of body-energy toxins and heavy metal settled mud.
