The grease-stained cloth smelled of burnt animal fat, vinegar, and roasted marrow.
Beneath the sagging hemp awnings of the Ghost-Lantern Bazaar, the air hung motionless and humid, thick with the green smoke of floating corpse-fat candles. Hundreds of hooded figures shuffled between the damp brick pillars of the Old Imperial Mint, trading in dead men’s silver and bloodstained heirlooms without uttering a single unnecessary word.
Lu Chen stood before a low slate slab propped on two salt-crusted beer casks.
On the damp stone lay three charred, brittle parchment fragments, their edges curled and blackened by ancient flame. The characters across the thick parchment were drawn in dried red stone blood-ink, written in the ancient seal-script of the fallen Blood Cauldron Sect.
It was the extinct Five-Viscera Combustion Scripture.
Across Gu Ning Province, the manual was notorious as an execution warrant masquerading as martial arts. Forty-two inner students of the old sect had tried its first breathing cycles over two hundred years. All forty-two had burned alive from the inside out. Their ribs turned into charred charcoal cages while their lungs boiled into gray ash.
To mortal flesh, the art was pure poison.
Human spirit veins were never evolved to endure five same-time internal burning chambers. The liver, heart, spleen, lungs, and kidneys of an ordinary Bone Forging expert could barely survive thirty-eight degrees of fever before suffering cellular collapse and blood-vessel rupture.
