The triumph of root access lasted exactly four seconds.
Then, Lin Ke’s chest caught fire from the inside out. Meanwhile, his ribs tried to freeze into solid glass.
A bubble of frothy, dark bright red blood welled up through his throat pipe, spilling past his lips before he could draw a breath. He dropped to his hands and knees on the white marble platform, the impact rattling his newly restructured skeleton with a sickening, hollow clang.
The heat-powered reality had caught up with him.
His Mid Golden Core was an internal fire. It spun at twenty-four thousand turns a minute and burned at five hundred degrees.
His ribs, newly infused with the patched Rotting Bone Chant, was an ice-cold heat-sink sitting at minus sixty degrees.
The distance between the burning core in his Dantian and the frozen bones of his chest bone was less than three inches of living meat.
Across that three-inch gap, a heat slope of five hundred and sixty degrees had established itself across his chest cavity.
