The taste of his own stomach bile came first.
Sour, hot, and laced with the coppery tang of broken tiny blood vessels, the fluid rose into Lin Ke’s mouth as every belly muscle seized into a violent, knot-like cramp. His breath locked behind his larynx in a strangled wheeze.
There was no anesthetic. In distributed living stonework, anesthesia was a fatal failure mode. If the sense nerves were numbed, the Tian Fu tracking data engine couldn’t measure signal attenuation across the cuts.
He had to be fully awake to feel every tiny fraction of an inch of his own flesh being ablated.
Lin Ke sat upright on the granite anvil slab, his spine rigid, his fingernails digging into his kneecaps until the coarse fabric tore.
Inside his lower belly, the Nine-Turn Golden Core was spinning at sixty thousand turns a minute. Around its glittering outer equator, Lin Ke directed a razor-thin needle of tightly packed Yang fire Qi—no thicker than a spider’s silk, high-pressure to three crushing deep-sea pressure.
Along his congenital glass spirit veins, the heat back-pressure was excruciating. The channels had zero stretch to absorb heat. Every heartbeat of ablation sent razor-sharp, diamond-edged pain shrieking through his lower belly nerve clusters.
