The heat didn’t build in stages. It struck like an electric arc fire shorting out against a water pipe.
Lin Ke was still kneeling in the blood-stained herbal bath, his chin dripping with black stone sludge, when Layer Three initialized in his Sea of Mind:
A flash of blinding scarlet fire ignited in the center of his lower dantian.
For seven years, Colin Shaw had survived the terrifying heat output of the Nine-Fold Crimson Palm by relying on the thick, hardened iron melted rock waste in his bones to soak up the excess calories.
Now, having just purged forty pounds of heavy metal from his marrow in Layer Two, his bones were lightweight diamond-cubic lattices—virtually see-through to heat, with zero heat heavy rush.
Without that crude heat-sink, the incoming wave of Yang fire had nowhere to go.
The heat of his blood surged past eighty degrees in one point two seconds.
Under the skin of his chest, his congenital glassy spirit veins lit up like neon tubes—blinding filaments of white-hot quartz, glowing with such ferocious intensity that the bones of his ribs were visible through his flesh like an X-ray.
