The height of endeavor

Xia had faith in his professional teammates. "They know very well that it's dangerous to interfere with the pace of a climber while he's on a high mountain. Due to their rich experience on high-elevation regions, they're also familiar about where and how to capture footage for the best visual effect," Xia says.

"We had a tacit understanding to not disturb me-they never asked me to pose for a shot. They established their camera positions in advance, and I barely saw them and was often not even aware where they were."

Breathing is difficult at such high altitudes, so they rarely talked with one another. Their only communication was at night when Xia rested at camp, and they would ask him to share his feelings in front of the camera.

In 1996, he was diagnosed with cancer but, following treatment, it seems to have gone into remission. During his latest attempt to conquer Qomolangma in 2018, he had to take medicine to cure his thrombosis.

He climbed slowly and carefully. He tried his best to reduce the range of his bodily motion in order to decrease friction between his upper legs and prostheses.

He stayed overnight at an altitude of 8,300 meters, rather than climbing for about 10 hours directly from the camp at 7,900 meters to the summit.

"I had to take a rest halfway, because it's easy to develop blisters if I climb for such a long time," he says. He did get a small blister and dealt with it in a timely manner-luckily, it did not bleed.

After the successful climb, his journey continues.

His next goal is to conquer the highest summits on the remaining six continents, as well as both the South Pole and North Pole.

His daily routine includes exercising for about five to six hours. He gets up at 5 am to lift weights, and then cycles to Xiangshan Mountain, also called Fragrant Hills, in Beijing to practice climbing techniques.

As outbound travel is still restricted due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, he initiated the campaign "A Hundred Cities, A Thousand Mountains" earlier this year, aiming to scale different mountains across China with other climbers.