The blood that came up from Qiao Ming’s throat did not taste of iron. It tasted of dark silt and salt water.
It rose suddenly, without the warning burst of a cough, flooding his mouth. Meanwhile, his hands were still pressed against the cooling wraps of linen and sea-cucumber salve. He opened his lips to draw air through the acrid haze of burned resin. Then, the liquid spilled across his lower lip in a hot, dark stream, spattering against the pale green jade doorstep between his bare feet.
On the white jade, the blood fluid looked almost black.
In the water-mapping medicine of the deep-sea trenches, body failure was measured not by fever or failing pulse, but by internal air-pressure collapse. A deep-sea diver climbed through eight hundred deep-water lengths of water without pausing at the staging ropes. Then, the dissolved gases inside the blood swelled wildly, tearing the tiny blood vessels of the alveoli and shearing the delicate lining of the lungs. For eighty nonstop hours, Qiao Ming had not merely stood watch at the thirty-first gate. He had acted as an organic grounding anchor for the entire White Jade Barrier.
Every shaking of the ninety-arm-length curtain of light, every high-pitched blast wave delivered by the breach-crawlers. Every high-pressure pulse hammering against the four-inch silver bead had traveled through the soles of his bare calloused feet and up through the dense skeletal framework of his legs, spine, and ribs. His skeleton had absorbed what the stones could not fade…
