The breath did not leave the mouth as steam; it turned to gravel in the teeth.
Two leagues into the Glacial Nave, the heat plunged through eighty degrees below zero. At this depth of the cold, air ceased to behave like a hospitable medium for living lungs. Every particle of moisture in the breath froze the instant it crossed the lips, transforming into tiny needles of six-sided ice that rattled against the teeth like fine sand and tore at the soft slimy lining of the throat with tiny, razor-like deep cuts.
Yan Zhiqiu had stopped walking.
She stood three paces behind Qiao Ming on the mirror-smooth surface of the starlight ice, her body bent double at the waist, both hands clamped over her mouth and throat. Her seal-fur hood was stiffened into an unbending back shell of white frost. Her eyelashes were bound together by frozen tears, and when she drew a breath in, the sound that rose from her chest was a dry, scraping rattle—the clear hiss of lungs beginning to glaze with internal frost.
Her spiritual core, cultivated through twenty years of quiet archival quiet focus in the libraries of Cloud-Harbor, was failing to maintain its protective warmth. In the mortal world, a Foundation Establishment fighter could endure winter in a single linen robe by circulating spiritual fire through the eight extraordinary vessels. But the cold of the Third Epoch was an ontological extinction—the complete cessation of heat-powered movement. It didn’t merely chill the flesh. It froze the…
