The pulse inside his bone marrow hummed like a steam turbine winding down after a sixty-day run.
Lin Ke sat upright in the center of the command pavilion, his legs crossed in the full lotus stance. The air around him was sweet and thick with the heavy scent of simmering healing roots. Steaming healing wraps of crushed dragon-knot vine, bitter pine-resin, and ground pearl-shell plastered across his fractured collarbone and wrapped tight against his splintered ribs.
The crisis had passed, but the most delicate operation remained.
A newly installed hardware stonework was not permanent until it had undergone post-installation heat annealing.
If he didn’t settle the internal flow across his newly minted iron-hard metal-glassy waveguides, the tiny fissures left by the Live Merge would calcify into permanent internal scar tissue, crippling his throughput forever.
“Sit still, boy,” Apothecary He muttered. He knelt behind Lin Ke and applying two boiling-hot cloth wraps directly over his shoulder blades. The pungent steam of bitter gentian and rendered snake-gall stung Lin Ke’s nostrils. “The bone-marrow paste is setting. If you twist your torso now, your collarbone will set crooked and you’ll spend eternity looking like a bent iron hook.”
“I won’t twist,” Lin Ke rasped, his eyes calm and focused.
