A red blindfold snapped across Lin Ke’s vision.
It wasn’t darkness. It was the blinding, sight glare of his own blood vessels expanding against his eyes under total crushing pressure.
The Crimson Yang, having coated his arms and torso, was surging upward along the spinal bus into his neck bones. At the crown of his skull, the Baihui (Hundred-Meeting) acupoint—the narrowest bottleneck in the human spirit vein network—choked.
The high-heat Yang star-fire had nowhere to go. It began pooling in his skull waveguides like boiling water trapped in a corked kettle.
The physical sensation was a spike of white-hot iron being hammered downward through his skull. His ears thrummed with a wet, ear-splitting roar, his eyeballs throbbing in their sockets as the pressure threatened to blow them outward.
Along his neck spine, his Vitreous Glass Spirit veins groaned under the sheer heat torque. Unlike traditional elastic vessels that could stretch to accommodate explosive surges, his rigid Bing-Mai had zero volume rule-following. Sharp, sound pinging echoed in his inner ear. Micro-fractures splintering across the quartz-like lining with the blinding agony of crushed glass driven directly into his lower brain.
Apothecary He’s grumpy snarl echoed through his memory, cutting through the roaring pressure. Before Lin Ke had climbed to the peak altar, the old healer had shoved the heavy lead flask into his ribs with an oath that smelled of sour vinegar and unwashed mortar bowls: “You arrogant fire fool. If that crown acupoint chokes, you won’t have time to file an…
