The skin-burning salt water was touching Ji Mingchuan’s sharkskin boots.
The water was rising through the drain tube grate in rhythmic, foaming pulses, hot with the chemical heat of packed sodium hydroxide, throwing up white wisps of bitter-salt steam that caught in the Scholar’s throat. Then it made him cough mouthfuls of bloody froth.
“Save me...” the Scholar sobbed, his high-born pride fully wiped out, his trembling hands clutching at Qiao Ming’s bare ankles. “Caspian... Brother... Elder brother... Don’t leave me to dissolve... I will give you the Nine Heavens... I will give you the golden scrolls...”
Qiao Ming did not look down at the pleading hands.
His mind was running with the cold, exact clarity of a land-mapper calculating the flight path of a four-knot current.
The cast-iron top door beam weighed four hundred and twenty pounds. It was three arm-lengths long, five inches thick, wedged tightly between the hard speckled rock jambs of the chute. A mortal man attempting to lift that beam with raw muscle would merely rupture his own lower-back bones without moving the iron an eighth of an inch.
He didn’t use raw muscle. He used shape.
He unslung his eight-foot ash-wood sounding staff from his back.
