The fever hit thirty-nine point eight degrees at hour eighteen.
Lin Ke lay on his back on the cold flat stone slabs, his fingers clawing at the stone seams. His body was slick with greasy, stone sweat that steamed as it dripped onto the dark rock.
Every breath tasted of scorched copper and spoiled milk.
His legs didn’t belong to him anymore. From the knees downward, both shins felt like sacks of wet gravel sunk in molten animal fat.
The outer-brain bone of his tibias and fibulas had dissolved into a spongy, cleaned out porous lattice. If he had tried to stand, the bone would have flattened like wet cardboard under his forty-kilo frame.
Inside his skull, an alarm clanged with relentless, ear-splitting regularity:
Lin Ke forced his swollen eyelids open.
Through the red haze of fever, he looked at his lower legs.
Beneath the stretched, semi-clear skin. His shins were glowed with an eerie, mottled light—swirls of rotting grey fighting against violent pulses of scarlet red stone. The sweat pooling around his calves was discolored, thick with chalky white settled mud that dried into brittle flakes against the stone.
Something is wrong, he thought through the delirium. The chelation isn’t locking. The latency is too high.
He summoned his diagnostics.
Tianfu. Diff.
A fourteen percent lag.
The osteolytic pulse was stripping the hardened melted rock waste on schedule. But the iron-red stone chelate was failing to bind to the cleaned out connective tissue scaffold.
Because his inner body heat had spiked so rapidly, the bright red blood speed was too high. The iron ions were flushing straight past the porous Haversian canals and precipitating into free-floating metal clusters within his bloodstream!
If those clusters reached his heart or brain, he would suffer a massive lung embolism or a fatal blood-starved stroke within twenty minutes.
A buffer overflow in the blood-vessel transport bus, Lin Ke diagnosed, his teeth chattering from the deep-bone chills despite the scorching fever.
The fluid is too hot. High striking force is preventing the liquid silver-sulfur chelation bonds from locking onto the receptor sites.
He needed to drop the local heat of his bright red blood right away without freezing the marrow.
He couldn’t use ice. External cooling was too slow.
Reverse the cooling loop.
During the Nine-Fold Crimson breakthrough months ago, Lin Ke had patched his spirit veins with a counter-current kidney liquid cooling loop, venting excess burning heat through his palm Laogong acupoints.
Normally, the loop dumped heat waste while drawing cool water Qi inward to protect his glass channels.
Now, he had to invert the cycle.
Force flash-heat outward through the hands and feet. Pull the sub-zero water Qi directly through the main thigh blood vessels.
Lin Ke rolled onto his stomach with a strangled groan. He dragged his useless, jelly-like legs behind him across the flat stone slabs.
He reached the stone basin he had placed near the anvil.
He planted both palms flat against the cold dark rock floor, spreading his fingers.
Nine-Fold Crimson. Reverse heat-powered inversion.
He unlocked the heat gates.
A violent, scorching surge of excess heat ripped through his glass spirit veins, bypassing his core and tunneling straight down his arms into his hands.
WHOOSH.
Jets of white-hot steam and orange sparks erupted from the carbonized scar tissue in his palms.
The heat vented with bone-shaking force, scorching black circular rings into the dark rock flags and cracking the stone beneath his hands.
At the same time, Lin Ke channeled the cold essence of the thirty northern spring-water vials he had ingested, directing the dense, icy Wood-Water Qi directly through his Yongquan and Taixi acupoints along the inner ankles.
The heat of his thigh bright red blood plummeted from forty degrees to thirty-six degrees in three seconds.
The heat shock was blinding.
Lin Ke’s vision washed out in a blinding flare of white light. His spine arched in a reflex, violent burst, every muscle fiber in his back locking like drawn bowstrings.
In his shins, the reaction changed.
With the blood cooled to the critical binding threshold, the free-floating iron ions dropped their moving rough churning.
The liquid silver-sulfur chelate latched onto the exposed connective tissue fibrils with starving chemical hunger.
Pulse.
The final micro-layer of hardened melted rock waste dissolved.
Rest.
The iron atoms crystal-hardened.
Layer by tiny layer, the porous sponge of his tibias hardened into a linked, three-space-folding lattice of interstitial iron and carbon.
GURGLE.
A violent, nauseating convulsion seized Lin Ke’s chest muscle.
His stomach heaved.
Lin Ke lunged his head over the stone basin and vomited.
It wasn’t food or bile.
It was a thick, thick, sticky torrent of jet-black, hardened melted rock waste. Stone-hard calcium phosphate, rusted iron waste scum, and hundreds of years of ancient healing poisons that had choked his marrow since childhood.
The foul muck hit the stone basin with a sickening, heavy splat, hissing and releasing a pale plume of acidic sulfur smoke that smelled of stale tombs.
Lin Ke vomited again, weeping stone-dense tears that burned his cheeks like saltwater on open cuts.
He collapsed against the rim of the basin, his chest heaving, his face pale as lard.
Then, from the bottom of his legs, came the sound.
TING.
It was a clear, sharp, crystal-clear chime.
It sounded like a freshly forged sword being cooled in winter water.
The sound rang upward through his shins, shaking cleanly through his knees and into his pelvis.
Lin Ke looked down.
The swelling in his lower legs had fully collapsed.
The skin over his tibias was smooth, taut, and cool to the touch.
Beneath the flesh, his shinbones were no longer the mottled, sickly white-yellow of human bone, nor the porous chalk of the poisoned manual.
They were a deep, polished, matte slate-grey.
Non-porous. Dense as forged tool steel.
The Haversian canals were open and lined with tiny metal sleeves, conducting spiritual essence with zero heavy drag.
Lin Ke bent his toes.
His ankles rotated with total, silky care. The dull ache that had haunted his shins for six months was gone. Evaporated, replaced by a quiet, huge sensation of grounded mass.
He had built an iron-hard foundation.
He reached for a vial of northern cold-spring dew, uncorking it with his teeth and pouring the icy water down his scorched throat.
He had no time to celebrate.
Above his waist, a sickening, cold shaking stirred in the base of his spine.
Hour twenty-four.
The osteolytic dissolving wave had cleared his pelvis.
It was now climbing into his lower-back bones.
The real test of perfect bone posture had just begun.