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Chapter 28 - Chapter 28 - Shear of the Ventricle

The world became a grinding hinge. The valve cusps, each a mountain of living bone and muscle, scissored shut with a force that screamed through the air. Li Tian was caught between them, a fly in a closing vice. There was no time for technique, only instinct. He twisted, angling his body to wedge between the leading edge of a cusp and the slick, fleshy wall. A thick, cord-like chordae tendon snapped taut beside him. He grabbed it, using it as a pivot to swing his legs out of the direct crushing path.

It wasn't enough. The closing pressure was immense, threatening to pop his lungs. In that lethal instant, he had no choice. He opened a pinpoint micro-devour in his palm, pressing it against the advancing cusp.

He wasn't trying to absorb the energy. He was trying to survive it. The backlash was a white-hot nail driven through his hand. Pins and needles exploded up his arm, and the taste of iron flooded his mouth. But he'd shaved a critical fraction of the force. He kicked off, spiral-bleeding the violent energy into the lamellar plate beneath him as he landed, his entire arm trembling with the aftermath.

He had dropped into the ventricle basin. The floor was a series of giant, tilting lamellar plates, rising and falling with each beat. Great papillary muscle columns thrust upwards, connected to the ceiling by a forest of tendon cords that plucked the air with a discordant hum. The beat here was faster, more violent than in the Ossuary above. Systole was a crushing descent, diastole a violent upward heave, and the hold between was a knife's edge. Adding to the chaos, shear jets—high-pressure streams of acidic fluid—erupted from the floor at the tail end of each systole, slicing through the air with a sound like tearing silk.

Match the beat, not the breath.

He recalibrated, his senses stretched to their limit. A misread—stepping onto a plate a moment too early—sent a lash of shear-force across his back. The pain was a hot wire, and he coughed, metallic and sharp. He recovered with a disciplined Vein Step, his feet finding the rhythm anew.

On the next diastole, a curtain of blood-mist surged. He turned his head, angling his damp cloth mask to let the corrosive flow around him. Chord-leeches dropped from the tendon harp above. With no marrow-salt left, he used timing, letting the diastolic draw yank two away. A third latched onto his leg. He tore it off with a strip of tendon he ripped from a nearby cord, then immediately spiral-bled the cold Qi-drain from the spot.

"You learn quickly."

The polite voice was a drop of poison in the cacophony. A talisman popped somewhere in the chamber's depths. The heart fluttered, a sudden arrhythmia that altered the timing of the shear jets. One erupted a half-beat early, missing Li Tian by inches. He didn't panic. He adapted, his footwork a model of precise cadence, refusing the reckless urge to use Star Lung · Empty Cup and risk a blackout.

His movement, a necessary evasion, brushed against a rail of condensed light. It flared. A Starlight Warden (Heart Variant) coalesced from the valve-glyphs, its form humming with the heart's broken song. It struck on the systole, its fists like falling anvils.

Li Tian's palm tingled with the memory of the Hollow Spiral Palm, but the cooldown was a raw, screaming void in his meridians. He couldn't use it. He wouldn't survive the backlash.

So he used the environment instead. He kited the Warden, leading it on a deadly dance across the tilting plates. On a powerful systole, he feinted, luring the construct into throwing a punch that intersected with a roaring shear jet. The jet slammed into the Warden, staggering it. Li Tian never traded blows. He moved only on the hold and diastole, letting the ventricle itself punish the construct. He baited it onto a plate that tilted violently on the next beat, sending it skimming towards a cluster of snapping tendon cords. One cord wrapped around its leg, and with a sound like a giant bowstring breaking, it was yanked into the darkness below. Li Tian's hand, clenched into a fist, trembled with the effort of restraint.

His eyes scanned the chamber, and the ring pulsed. There. A seam in the wall, almost invisible, lined with hair-thin star-metal staples—a Pericardial Suture Port. A whisper brushed his mind: "Pericardial seam… suture port…"

He pulled the star-map shard from his pocket. As he held it near the seam, the shard hummed, and the staples glowed in recognition. The seam irised open, revealing a narrow, dark slit. It wouldn't stay open for long. He mapped the path: a sprint across three tilting plates, timing his steps to hit the slit during the two-hold window that followed a specific diastole + one-beat delay.

He refused the siren call of Empty Cup. The blackout risk was too high. He would do this with discipline alone.

He committed. As the correct diastole hit, he launched into the sprint, his Vein Steps perfect, his Star Lung exhalations timed to the millisecond. He was a breath away from the slit.

"After you."

The polite line was a death sentence. A talisman popped. A secondary valve blew open elsewhere.

The heart convulsed. A tamponade-like pressure surge—an arrhythmic double-beat—slammed through the chamber. The suture port shuddered and began to collapse inward.

Li Tian was halfway through the seam when it clamped down around his chest. His ribs groaned in protest. Then came the flood—a roaring, acidic torrent of pericardial fluid, surging from behind to swallow him whole.

The ring pulsed a steady, hopeless warning as darkness and impossible pressure closed in.

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