Lu Chen followed the mud trail until it ended where the ditch met the dead water.
He crouched beside the drainage under-road drain, two miles south of the Black Water County gatehouse. The night air was heavy with the smell of stale pond weed, rotting carp. The sour chemical bite of drying river silt. He ran two fingers across the stone rim.
The smear was pale gray and crusted over with tiny crystal-clear flecks of dried salt. Trapped inside the gray crust were three strands of bright scarlet silk, finer than spider thread, still glistening as though freshly dipped in pig blood.
They were matching to the threads Doctor Bai had pulled from Merchant Song’s lung tubes six hours ago.
Lu Chen reached into his left sleeve. His calloused fingers found the cold square shank of the four-inch iron bone awl. He pressed the sharp tip into the thick mound below his left thumb until the skin yielded and a dark bead of hot crimson bubbled up against the iron.
A clean prick of pain traveled up his median nerve.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
The reality seam held firm. He exhaled slowly. The air leaving his mouth formed a dense cone of white vapor that drifted across the reeds.
His internal heat read a steady 40.2 degrees. The charcoal-colored melted rock waste veins branching across his left collarbone gave off a low, throbbing warmth, like coals buried under river gravel. Against the wet chill of the ditch, the heat was a constant body-energy drain.
He reached into his leather belt pouch, pulled out a thumb-sized cube of dried sheep fat. Then he slipped it past his teeth.
The fat was cold and gritty with coarse salt. But it dissolved on his tongue. Then, his belly absorbed the calories with greedy smooth speed. The dull ache behind his chest bone pulled back.
He stood up, adjusting the grip of his right hand on the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
Ahead lay the South Canal Lock.
In the daylight, the lock was an abandoned relic from the last dynasty, a massive stone choke point where barges once paid toll grain before entering the county canal network. Now, half the water gate gates had rotted away. Huge timbers of water-blackened oak hung crooked in their iron brackets, choked by years of silt, collapsed willow trunks, and floating mats of emerald duckweed.
The water inside the lock basin didn’t flow. It sat dead between two granite embankments, oily and black under the moonless sky.
Lu Chen walked down the slimy limestone ramp. His boots made no sound on the wet stone. Every step was measured, weight kept on the balls of his feet, balance point anchored low.
The stone embankment ended at a set of sunken mooring posts.
Around the thick cedar posts, the water was unnaturally still. Not even the night wind skimming across the marshes could produce a ripple on its surface. Yet Lu Chen stepped within five paces of the water’s edge. Then, a faint shaking traveled up through the stone slabs beneath his leather soles.
It wasn’t a current. It was a rhythmic, wet pulling sensation.
He lowered his gaze.
Beneath the layer of duckweed, six inches under the black surface, hundreds of thin scarlet threads were strung between the sunken timber wooden support posts like the web of a funnel spider. Every thread stretched taut into the dark maw of the underwater water gate tunnel.
And clinging to those threads were shapes.
A pale, bloated knee broke the surface of the green scum. It was followed by the rounded curve of a waterlogged shoulder.
He held his position. Backing up on a slimy ramp was an invitation to slip, and in combat against waterborne horrors, losing footing meant death.
He set his feet wide and raised the notched cleaver to shoulder height.
The water broke with a sound like tearing wet cloth.
Three bodies erupted from the duckweed in a same-time lunge.
They weren’t fresh corpses. Their flesh was the color of curdled grease, bloated and split along the seams of their limbs to expose yellow adipose tissue and black, stale veins. Freshwater clams and jagged river snails had rooted into their collar bones and sunken eye sockets. Their lower jaws hung slack, out-of-joint by the pressure of the silt, held together only by rotted tendons and strings of foul river muck.
The center ghoul flew at Lu Chen’s throat, its webbed fingers tipped with blackened, split nails.
Lu Chen’s breathing stayed even.
Gale Cleaver.
His right shoulder pivoted with explosive torque. The twelve-pound cleaver cut through the damp fog with a shrieking whistle. The heavy, notched iron spine struck the leaping ghoul directly across the bridge of its rotted nose.
Crack!
The skull caved inward like an overripe melon. Rotten brain matter and foul black river sludge sprayed into the air. The blast wave tore through the ghoul’s neck spine, snapping its neck clean off its shoulders.
The headless torso hit the limestone ramp with a heavy, wet slap.
The black bile splattered across Lu Chen’s oilcloth apron. The foul fluid touched the fabric over his chest. Then, it hissed and turned to gray steam, boiled away by the blasting heat leaking from his core.
Before the first corpse finished sliding down the ramp, the second ghoul struck low.
It lunged from the waterline. It wrapped its cold, slippery arms around Lu Chen’s left boot. He drove its blackened teeth straight into the meat of his calf.
Snap!
The sound was not the tearing of human muscle. It was the sound of brittle, decayed teeth shattering against granite.
The ghoul’s rotten jaw fractured into jagged shards against Lu Chen’s skin.
Ox-Demon Iron Skin, Tier 5 MAX.
To a mundane blade or rotted teeth, the flesh of Lu Chen’s legs was denser than seasoned oak and tougher than boiled bull hide. The impact barely registered as pressure against his shin bone.
“Wrong prey,” Lu Chen said quietly.
He shifted his weight and brought his left heel down like a pile driver.
The iron heel of his boot crushed through the ghoul’s chest bone. Ribs snapped with a muffled crunch, flattening the waterlogged chest cavity into the stone. Without pausing, Lu Chen reversed the cleaver in his right hand and drove the square iron butt of the weapon straight through its rotted temple.
The ghoul stopped thrashing.
A third creature vaulted over the water gate timbers, its pale, hairless body twisting in mid-air. It didn’t aim for Lu Chen. It aimed for his cleaver arm, trying to bind his weapon with its water-slick limbs.
Lu Chen didn’t swing.
He stepped inside the leap, tucked his chin. Then he drove his iron-hard left shoulder straight into the creature’s chest bone.
The crash sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a sack of wet sand.
The ghoul was hurled backward ten paces through the air, crashing into the rusted iron chains of the water gate winch. The heavy chains clattered loudly, shaking rust and dried moss into the dark water.
Silence settled over the lock basin.
Lu Chen stood on the ramp, his chest rising and falling in deep, rhythmic cycles. White steam poured from the collar of his tunic, swirling around his jaw before vanishing into the night mist.
He looked down at his boots.
The black mud around his feet was moving.
It wasn’t washing away with the tide. It was bubbling.
From the dark center of the lock. There, the water was ten feet deep, half a dozen pale heads began to surface one after another. Their cloudy, dead eyes reflected no light, but all of them were staring directly at him.
And between their waterlogged throats ran the same fine scarlet thread, woven together into a thick, pulsing rope of silk that stretched straight down beneath his boots, anchoring into the silt under the limestone ramp.
The stone under his boots shifted.
A sudden, violent pull jerked the slab downward.
The embankment collapsed into the basin with a muffled roar of mud and displaced water.
Lu Chen’s boots plunged into the freezing sludge.
Within a heartbeat, the canal silt had swallowed him to his knees. The freezing Yin water rushed over his shins, biting straight toward the fire in his marrow.