Canal silt hissed against the sole of Lu Chen’s boot, oily and reeking.
Beneath the leather, Senior Brother Gou’s right wrist was pinned flat against the slime-covered cobblestones. Gou’s face was pressed into the gutter muck, his chest heaving with choked, ragged sobs as agony pulsed from his shattered kneecap.
“Let go,” Gou gasped through bloody lips, clawing uselessly at the stones. “Master Tie Shan will skin you alive for taking that ring!”
Lu Chen crouched down, keeping his balance point planted firmly on Gou’s arm.
With his left hand, he pushed back the greasy sleeve of Gou’s tunic to expose the heavy bronze ring on the guard’s thumb.
Up close, the ring was vile.
The metal was not smooth brass, but pitted, porous bronze crusted with thick green rust. Carved along its outer rim was the twisted face of a drowning corpse, its mouth agape in an eternal scream.
Dark, thread-like tendrils of icy mist seeped continuously from the metal pores. It curled around Gou’s blackened thumb like leech-like worms.
It was an oddity. A contaminated relic dredged from the black silt of the county canal. It was bound by the lingering resentment of a waterborne death.
Gou had worn it as a martial treasure, believing the cold strength it granted his grip was a blessing from heaven. He was too ignorant to realize the relic was slowly devouring his marrow to fuel its unnatural power.
Lu Chen reached out his calloused right thumb and forefinger.
He clamped the bronze ring firmly.
The moment his skin touched the green rust, the relic reacted. The carved face on the metal seemed to widen its hollow eyes. A wave of freezing, rotting malice surged along Lu Chen’s fingertips, eager to invade his heart and freeze his blood into black sludge.
It hit an iron fire instead.
Inside Lu Chen’s dantian, the Ox-Demon Iron Skin flared with fiery intensity. His core heat surged past forty-one degrees. It roared down his hardened melted rock waste-veins like liquid lead poured down a copper pipe.
The icy malice didn’t freeze his hand.
It was seized by the crucible, dragged backward against its will, and swallowed whole into the burning core of his chest.
The ring gave a sharp, high-pitched screech that sounded like glass dragging across an iron plate.
The green rust turned gray.
The heavy bronze cracked along the eye sockets of the carved face, spiderwebbing with brittle fissures. Before Gou’s scared eyes, the ancient metal crumbled into a handful of dry, pale ash that scattered into the rainy wind.
Gou let out a strangled whimper of total despair. The secret weapon that had earned him his senior student status was gone in a single breath.
Lu Chen ignored him.
Within his dantian, two hundred and sixty units of purified malice spun in a tight, churning vortex. The power was volatile, demanding immediate channelization before the melted rock waste-veins along his ribs overheated.
He opened his internal crucible ledger.
His twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver had great defensive mass. But its striking speed remained limited by ordinary mortal body leverage. In close-quarters combat against true martial masters, speed dictated survival.
Elevate Gale Cleaver, Lu Chen commanded silently. Tier three maximum.
The crucible blew up within his neural pathways.
It wasn’t gentle enlightenment. It was twenty thousand violent repetitions of wrist snaps, blade angles, and wind-shearing arcs forced directly into his muscle memory in less than three seconds.
His shoulder muscles spasmed.
The tendons in his right forearm pulled taut like tuned bowstrings, micro-tears stitching together with hot scar tissue as the crucible forced his physical frame to adapt to the new threshold.
A wave of phantom agony rippled through his temples, distorting his outer vision with dark, swimming shadows.
His left hand slipped into his wide sleeve, drawing out the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl. Without blinking, he drove the blunt tip half an inch into the thick callous at the base of his left thumb.
Pain—sharp, physical, and real—erupted through his forearm nerve.
Dark crimson blood welled up around the cold iron spike, grounding his nervous system against the mental recoil.
Lu Chen breathed out a plume of gray steam into the cold air.
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked,” he whispered through gritted teeth.
The shadows vanished. His vision snapped back into crisp, cold and exact clarity.
Lu Chen stepped off Gou’s wrist and reached down to grip the wrapped handle of his ox-bone cleaver.
He drew the heavy blade from his hemp sash with a casual flick of his wrist.
Fwump!
The twelve-pound iron blade didn’t swing like a clumsy butcher’s tool. It cut the air with a thin, whistling hiss, leaving a faint empty pocket wake that pulled the rain mist inward.
A falling drop of dirty gutter water was sliced cleanly in half three inches before it touched the mud.
Lu Chen reversed the cleaver and slipped it smoothly back into his sash.
The balance was perfect. The weight transfer was seamless.
He looked down at the three crippled students.
Zhao and Hu were already dragging themselves through the muck on their elbows, their shattered knees trailing behind them like broken oars.
Gou remained slumped on his side, his face gray with shock, clutching his inverted right leg.
“Take your limbs,” Lu Chen said, his voice flat as gravestone granite. “Crawl back to your hall.”
Lu Chen picked up his wrapped parcel of sheep fat from the dry nook where he had set it. Without looking back, he walked out of Butcher Alley, heading north toward the dead-house lanterns.
***
Two hours later, in the Sixth Ward of Black Water County.
The grand courtyard of the Iron Fist School was lit by twelve iron fire bowls roaring with pine charcoal. The air smelled of sulfur, bitter liniment, and roasting ox meat.
On a heavy chair carved from aged hardwood sat Master Tie Shan.
Tie Shan was fifty years old, built like a castle gate, his torso bare beneath a sleeveless vest of striped tiger hide. His bronze skin was crisscrossed with faded blade scars. The knuckles on his massive hands were swollen to the size of walnuts from thirty years of pounding iron sand.
Between his calloused palms, Tie Shan rolled two solid iron exercise balls with a heavy, grinding rasp. The metal sound kept the dozens of junior students standing in the courtyard in scared silence.
The heavy wooden gates groaned open.
Two blood-soaked attendants staggered into the torchlight, carrying a groaning heap between them.
Behind them crawled Zhao and Hu. It dragged their ruined legs across the packed gravel, leaving wide, dark red smears on the clean stone.
They dropped Senior Brother Gou onto the flat stone slabs at the foot of Tie Shan’s dais.
Gou’s face was swollen, his lips stained with dried vomit and bile. His right leg was bent ninety degrees to the side, the knee swollen into a purple mass the size of a melon.
“Master,” Gou cried, pressing his forehead into the cold flat stone slabs. “Avenge us!”
Tie Shan’s iron balls stopped rolling.
The courtyard fell dead silent, save for the crackling of the fire bowls.
Tie Shan leaned forward, his heavy brows drawing together into a fierce, hungry ridge. His bronze eyes scanned the three men, taking in the splintered cudgels and the clean, total bone fractures.
“Who did this?” Tie Shan’s voice was low, like boulders tumbling down a dry riverbed. “Was it the Northern Blade Society, or the Judge’s iron vanguard?”
“Neither,” Gou sobbed, his voice cracking with humiliation. “It was a corpse-washer from the Seventh District Mortuary named Lu Chen.”
Tie Shan’s eyes narrowed into slits.
“A corpse-washer?” Tie Shan repeated slowly. “Three trained students beaten with their own cudgels by a dead-house apprentice?”
“He has iron skin, Master!” Gou cried desperately. “Our iron bands warped against his chest. He crushed the canal ring to dust with two fingers!”
Tie Shan didn’t move for three full breaths.
Then, his massive right hand tightened around the two solid iron exercise balls.
CRUNCH!
Veins like knotted black vipers bulged across Tie Shan’s bronze forearm. Under the terrifying, crushing force of the Iron Sand Palm, the two solid iron balls groaned, twisted. Then it fused into a single, mangled lump of metal in his palm.
He dropped the ruined iron onto the flat stone slabs, where it rang with a dull, heavy thud.
Tie Shan stood up. His towering six-foot-four frame cast a long, monstrous shadow across the fire bowl-lit courtyard.
“A corpse-scrubber dares to snap the bones of my students,” Tie Shan said, each word laced with killing intent. “He dares to destroy my school’s canal treasure.”
He swept his gaze across the thirty armed students standing around the courtyard.
“Gather the second-year students,” Tie Shan ordered, his voice echoing off the timber rafters. “Find out who backs this dead-house dog. When the sun sets tomorrow, I want his arms broken, his ribs shattered. His head brought to my table.”
The students slammed their fists over their chests all at once.
“Yes, Master!”