The surrounding air in the cave was no longer merely hot. It had crossed into active heat-powered hazard territory.
One hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit.
Lin Ke’s lungs burned with every shallow breath. The moist heat, soaked with boiled away blood and sulfur dioxide, hung like a wet wool blanket over his skin. Sweat evaporated from his forehead before it could bead. That left a white crust of dried salt crystals across his eyebrows.
Beneath his leather kidney belt, the Dai Mai solenoid was entering critical failure.
The four remapped collateral channels were running red-hot.
When metal gets hot enough, its magnetic pull starts to fade away. The principle was even more brutal. The surrounding heat load overloaded his Sanjiao counter-current cooling loop. Then, the magnetic flux of the Dai Mai began experiencing severe heat drift.
If the magnetic field drifted past twenty percent, the suspended star-fire torus inside his lower dantian would wobble off-center.
The micro-fusion core would graze his peritoneal wall. A single touch would turn his intestines into carbon soot.
