The surface of the cooking pot looked like a pot of boiling pitch mixed with lye.
Every bubble that burst sent a spray of steaming, acidic grease splashing against the iron rim. It dissolved the rivets into smoking grey slime.
Lin Ke knelt on the edge of the narrow high walkway, looking down into the boiling vortex.
His right arm was out-of-joint, the joint reset but the joint cords torn to shreds, hanging uselessly at his side. That left his uninjured limb: his left arm.
The left arm was flesh, blood. The dense, metal Ashen Iron bone lattice forged during his earlier foundation cleansing.
Normal human meat sunk in boiling blood-acid at eleven hundred degrees would experience third-degree full-thickness burns in 0.8 seconds. By 2.5 seconds, the fat under the skin would liquefy. The deep muscle layers would detach from the surface of the bone.
By four seconds, the fingers would be stripped to the bare bone.
Lin Ke closed his eyes for a split-second test query.
