The darkness inside his lungs was turning crimson.
At twenty-five meters of depth, under three and a half sea-weights of crushing deep water pressure, the human body ceases to negotiate with its biology. Every second was an agony of chemical suffocation. The carbon dioxide in his bright red blood was screaming for venting, triggering violent, rhythmic convulsions in his chest muscle that threatened to rip the ox-sponge from between his clenched teeth.
If water entered his larynx now, the laryngospasm would lock his throat shut forever. He would drown twenty paces beneath the dry sky, his chest packed with salt mud.
Qiao Ming did not allow his eyes to wander from the cracked stone.
He jammed the glowing-bronze metal ring of his hardwood Jacob’s staff into the newly split seam of the granite top door beam. The five-foot staff of dense, straight-grained timber entered four inches into the fracture, biting into the crystal-clear quartz and pink rock matrix. The bronze tip grated against the stone with a dull, gritty rasp that he felt through his gloves into the bones of his wrists.
He needed a pivot point. Without a rigid point of leverage, an Archimedean bar was nothing more than a stick drifting in the current.
