On the sixtieth day of his mountain retreat, dawn broke over the Dragon-Spine Ravine in a sky of pure, icy violet.
The sub-zero gale that had howled through the gorge for two months had fully died away. That left an eerie, crystal-clear stillness across the Mist Peak Range. The surrounding heat stood at twenty degrees below zero. But the air felt crisp, sharp, and invigorated with pure alpine oxygen.
Pei Jing walked down the gravel bank to the plunge basin for the final time.
He wore only his coarse linen breeches, his bare skin gleaming pale and smooth in the twilight. He had discarded the leather cuffs on his knees and elbows. After sixty days of nonstop high-pressure conditioning, his skin was no longer unsafe to the scouring abrasion of suspended ice-slow silt.
He stepped into the plunge pool.
The water was one degree above freezing, filled with swirling platelets of river ice. When the freezing liquid lapped against his calves and thighs, his nervous system didn’t flinch. His tiny blood vessels didn’t panic into vasoconstrictive shock.
His blood-vessel system kept an easy, balanced balance. His bright red blood, soaked with crimson-gold life-force, circulated through his hands and feet with smooth, zero-drag water-flow grace. That kept his tissues warm and flexible without wasting a single calorie of body-energy heat.
