The water of the Drowned Dao was not cold like winter mountain runoff. It was cold like the absence of all created warmth, an ancient, spirit chill that sank right away through Qiao Ming’s skin, piercing down to the bone surface of his bones and clamping around his heart like an iron vise.
He opened his eyes in the dark. There was no sunlight, no lantern beam. There was only the swirling, living-glow murk of dissolved sky embers that drifted past his face like falling sparks in a put out forge. The thickness of the liquid was huge—nearly twice the weight of fresh river water—pressing against his ears with the weight of twenty sea-weights, each heartbeat thudding inside his skull like a muffled bronze bell struck beneath the floorboards. The gritty grit suspended in the salt water tore at the skin of his bare shoulders, scouring his flesh with the sharpness of crushed quartz.
He didn’t fight the current. He knew that struggling against forty tons of rushing fluid would exhaust his oxygen in twenty heartbeats. He let his body sink, following the downward pull of the main vortex, his hands extended before him like twin blind feelers. The horsehair line around his waist was a nonstop, shaking lifeline that connected him to the dry air thirty arm-lengths above, its friction against his ribs steady, taut, and reassuring.
