The air in the outer gatehouse began to glow with the sickly, unnatural soft glow of a rotting corpse.
Through the mica check port, Qiao Ming watched the final disintegration of Scholar Zhu Heling’s mortal identity. The nine blood-water drops pills had fully burned up the scholar’s natural spirit-veins. It replaced his blood-flow system with a seething network of volatile crimson star-fire that burned through his flesh from within.
The man was no longer pacing. He was suspended three inches above the flooded floor, held aloft by the raw, unstable floating of his fourteenth-tier spiritual surge. Around his body, the salt water was atomizing into white clouds of scalding steam that condensed upon the ceiling arches and fell in bitter, chemical rain.
He unhooked his Folded brass star-compass and engaged the psychic heat wave sensor.
The instrument’s needles registered an extreme influx of short-wavelength spiritual gamma heat wave: zero point fourteen angstroms, with total ego-dissolving. Zhu Heling was no longer acting out of math or greed. His mind had collapsed into a single, monomaniacal impulse: to discharge the entire striking force of his dying soul against the Great Iron Arch.
He was like a collapsing star that had exhausted its hydrogen and was now collapsing toward end-post star-blast.
