Lin Ke’s vision burned down to a blinding, monochromatic sheet of blazing bright white.
The sensation was not heat in the ordinary mortal sense. It was an all-consuming, high-voltage scouring that stripped the sense of self from his flesh. Every nerve ending from his fingertips to his brain cortex fired at the same time at maximum hum, flooding his brain with the man-made taste of copper shavings, the ear-splitting scream of whistling turbines. The smell of his own flash-broiled skin.
His Ashen-Iron ribs hummed like a tuning fork struck with a sledgehammer.
Through his semi-clear chest, his glassy spirit veins didn’t expand. They were Bing-Mai—congenital glass waveguides with zero stretch—and under the four-hundred-percent load factor of the land-wide ancient wave, they began to emit an eerie, high-energy cerulean soft glow that shone clean through his chest muscles. The Ashen Iron lattice fused into his skeletal matrix groaned under the huge magnetic torque. It shook with a high-pitched metal shriek that sounded like wire ropes snapping under maritime strain.
Below the quartz dais, Apothecary He threw his weight against Meng Shan’s back.
“His core temp is spiking past one hundred and twelve degrees!” He screamed through the roaring storm of spark-charged air, his hands blistering as he dumped the first flagon of Cold-Marrow Decoction over Lin Ke’s locked ankles. “His fluid-draining fluid is vaporizing! If his heart doesn’t stop from fatal heart flutter in thirty seconds, his blood will boil him from the inside out!”
