Lu Chen’s fingertips had stopped stinging twenty minutes ago, the ice packed under his nails gone quiet. That was a bad sign. When numbness set in, black flesh-rot followed before sunrise.
He scraped the marrow-knife along the whetstone. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. The rhythmic rasp was the only sound inside the Seventh District Mortuary, save for the wind rattling the oiled-paper window frames. Outside, the night curfew was total. In Black Water County, anyone caught past the hour of the Boar without a judge’s brass lantern belonged to whatever crawled out of the mist.
Lu Chen paused. He pressed the blunt end of his iron bone awl into the callous of his left thumb. Deep. A sharp needle of hot ache flashed up his forearm nerve.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
He exhaled a long plume of white steam. Good. The reality seam was firm. He was still Lu Chen, third-class dead-house laborer, transmigrated four weeks ago into an empire that was rotting from its marrow out.
The Great Yong Dynasty was dead in all but name. In this northern borderland, the royal dragon veins had cracked three ages ago. That left the earth cold, barren, and porous to the Uncanny. Mortals lived behind packed-earth castle walls and wooden palisades, burning bitter animal fat lamps to keep the dark from seeping under their doors. Martial artists spent decades battering their shins against hardwood poles just to forge their bones. But a single formless specter could slip through a locked keyhole and suck their marrow dry in five breaths.
Here in the Seventh Ward, flesh was cheap. Horrors were forever.
On the central stone cutting table lay corpse number four.
A girl. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen. The daughter of Merchant Song, dragged out of the canal three leagues south of the city gates by the water-gate dredge team. The skin was waterlogged, gray as pig lard, with river weeds knotted into her scalp.
Normal drowning victims didn’t bleed after twelve hours in the silt.
This one had fresh scarlet fluid weeping from the soles of her feet. It soaked directly into a pair of spotless, hand-stitched red silk bridal slippers. The dye was so vibrant it seemed to pulse in the dim yellow light of the hanging whale-oil lantern.
“Old Song swore she was wearing coarse hemp sandals when she fell from the grain barge,” Lu Chen muttered under his breath, his voice flat and low.
He reached for his cedar salt bowl and a jar of raw burning lime powder. He didn’t touch the corpse with bare skin. That was rule number one in the Watchman’s Primer. Touch a drowned body with bare flesh. The cold stays in your marrow until winter takes your toes.
The stone slab creaked.
It wasn’t a settling tremor of the granite pillars. It was the distinct, wet sound of a dead spine straightening against wet stone.
Lu Chen didn’t scream. Screaming wasted breath and made the heart race. In a freezing room, a racing pulse only drained heat from his hands. Just then, he needed his grip most. He slid two paces back, his boots finding traction on the coarse salt and grit strewn across the damp floorboards. He lifted the heavy notched ox-bone cleaver with his right hand.
The corpse’s neck turned. The spine bones popped—crack, crack, snap—like dry green bamboo thrown into a kiln.
Her eyes were sunken pits of milky jelly, but her jaw dropped open. A black, thick, sticky sludge dribbled past her gray teeth, with the reek of stale bog water, rotten reeds, and spoiled pork fat.
A semi-clear amber haze flickered across the lower periphery of Lu Chen’s vision, cold and sharp against his eye nerve.
The heat in the dead-house plummeted ten degrees in a heartbeat. Frost crawled across the surface of the cedar salt bowl. That turned the coarse crystals into brittle gray stones. The flame of the animal fat lamp shrank to the size of a blue pea, fluttering against the sudden empty pocket.
The corpse launched off the granite slab.
No windup. No muscle pull. Just a hideous, ragdoll jerk through the freezing air, blackened fingernails hooked into curved talons aimed straight for Lu Chen’s windpipe.
Lu Chen stepped forward.
He didn’t dodge backward. The wall behind him was damp pine planks, easily splintered and easily pinned. He stepped into the strike. He lowered his balance point by six inches. His left hand threw the iron bowl of coarse salt directly into the open, sludge-filled mouth.
Hiss!
The salt boiled on contact with the black fluid like cold water poured into smoking pig fat. The corpse screeched—a sound like iron scraping against a bronze bell—and its mid-air flight path wavered by two inches to the left.
Two inches was all the clearance an experienced butcher needed.
Lu Chen dropped his hips, torqueing his waist and driving off the back heel. His right arm, hardened by four years of skinning cattle and scraping animal fat, drove the notched cleaver upward in a savage slanted arc. The iron spine caught the corpse under the chin. Bone cracked. The notched edge bit deep, lodging halfway through the jaw bone.
The cold hit him right away.
A wave of numbing, rotting Yin-frost surged down the iron blade, freezing his knuckles solid, gray frost climbing up his forearm toward his chest like creeping lichen. His heart stumbled. His breath seized in his throat.
It doesn’t bleed out. Steel doesn’t kill it.
The corpse’s frozen hands clamped onto Lu Chen’s wrists with the force of iron vices dipped in freezing liquid. Her face was four inches from his, the stench of ancient canal silt washing over his nose.
Deep in his sea of mind, the amber crucible hummed against his ribs, detecting direct physical contact: Target locked. Potential yield: 140 units. Override active.
Harvest, Lu Chen commanded internally.
A sound like a kiln door kicking open in a gale roared inside his skull.
The black frost creeping up his forearm reversed wildly. The icy malice pouring from the corpse didn’t freeze his heart—it was dragged down his central spirit vein into his lower belly. There, an invisible crucible flared white-hot.
The corpse gasped. Its milky jelly eyes widened in what looked remarkably like animal shock.
Black smoke billowed from its mouth, tear ducts, and ears, drawn wildly into Lu Chen’s palms. The red silk bridal shoes withered, the scarlet dye turning into pale gray dust that drifted across the stone floor like dry ash.
With a final wet shudder, the corpse collapsed into a pile of limp, graying flesh, cold water spilling from its nostrils onto the floorboards.
Outside, heavy iron-shod boots crunched wildly on the frozen gravel path leading to the dead-house doors.
“Watchman!” a harsh, gravelly voice barked from beyond the wood. “Open up! The Judge’s carriage spotted a black cloud dropping over your roof. If you’ve let a ghoul loose in Seventh Ward, your head comes off before dawn!”
It was Corporal Wu of the county night patrol, with the clatter of iron axe-spears and brass lantern chains.
Lu Chen looked at his blackened, smoking fingers, then at the withered pile of silk ash at his feet. His chest felt hollow, like an empty cast-iron boiler waiting for the first shovel of coal.
He focused on the mental node.
One-Click: Max.
Inside his chest, a fire exploded.
His collarbone snapped forward, joint padding popping like dry pine bark as his skin layers thickened into dense slate-colored leather. The pain was blinding. A searing, roaring tide of boiling Yang energy that tore through every clogged spirit vein in his upper torso. It burned away mortal frailty and left behind scorched iron.
The door rattled under a heavy boot strike. Splinters jumped from the crossbar.
Lu Chen wiped the blood from his thumb and exhaled a thick cloud of scalding white vapor. Gray ash still lay at his feet, and his skin was still steaming.