Four seconds of dead silence stretched across the stone clinic. It was broken only by the skin-burning drip of vinegar-broth onto the flat stone slabs.
Lin Ke didn’t look at the flatline. He didn’t look at Apothecary He’s trembling, grease-stained hands hovering over Meng Shan’s throat with a bone-setting mallet and splints of split bamboo.
He drove the twelfth iron needle two inches deep into the base of the giant’s neck spine.
Shhh-clack.
A high-pressure jet of grey stone powder shot from the hollow eye of the twelfth needle, spraying across Lin Ke’s linen collar. The fine limestone dust smelled of stale tomb silt and burnt chalk, coating his eyelashes and stinging his throat.
Underneath the stone check slab, Meng Shan’s massive chest hitched with a violent, bone-shaking gasp.
A ragged pulse surged against the iron needles. Thirty beats per minute, then forty, sluggish and thick as river silt, but fighting desperately against the internal turning to stone. Every heartbeat sounded like a leather bellows forcing sand through a rusted pipe.
“Still alive,” Lin Ke said. He leaned back against the cold stonework. His knees shook from the care strain on his own micro-fractured glass spirit veins. “The pressure has steadied, but the carrier wave is still incoming.”
