The bone-saw sounded louder in a man’s own head than it ever did in a running theater.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke stood in the center of a body wireframe representing his skeletal structure at the end of his fire-ward days. Every bone was lit up in sickly, leaden grey.
Commit 038 was the Deep-sea Bone-Melting Ashen Marrow Chant. The forbidden body-tempering art he had scavenged from the dead outer sect overseer to survive the winter purge.
It had served its purpose. It had hardened his skeleton until he could block steel broadswords with his bare forearm bone. But the cost was buried deep in the commit log:
An iron-doped skeleton, Lin Ke analyzed with cold distaste.
In a traditional fighter, having forty percent of your marrow cavity filled with magnetic ferrosilicon was considered a blessing. It made your bones heavy, gave your punches crushing driving force, and deflected light blades.
In a system designed for a solid-state Golden Core, it was fatal.
The core condensed and began its high-hum energetic deep ring. Then, any magnetic material within eighteen inches of the dantian would experience massive magnetic-pull eddy currents. His femurs and pelvis would heat up like power-coil coils on a steel mill, boiling his bone marrow in thirty seconds.
