The taste of raw metal came first. Not the clean copper of fresh blood, but the bitter, greasy tang of rusted iron filings soaked in battery acid.
Lin Ke hung over the wooden rim of the granite basin, his fingers clawing into the stone until his nails split. His core heat was skyrocketing. His skin burned at forty-one point two degrees, streaming heat so intense that the blood-red water around his waist began to bubble with tiny, persistent beads of boiling foam.
In his Sea of Mind, the system was executing Layer Two:
The chelation was physical, gut-deep, and unspeakably violent.
For seven years, forty pounds of toxic iron-stone-glass melted rock waste had been embedded inside the porous stonework of his bones.
Now, driven by the high-pressure execution thread of the Tian Fu runtime, the newly forming diamond-cubic carbon lattice was aggressively displacing the foreign metal atoms from the calcium hydroxyapatite matrix.
Every osteon in his skeleton groaned.
CLICK. CRACK. CRUNCH.
