Canal silt gripped Lu Chen’s shins with high-pressure suction. It didn’t behave like normal river mud. It had the consistency of cooling glue.
Beneath the black surface, four pairs of waterlogged, webbed hands clamped around his ankles. Bloated fingers dug into the thick leather of his boots. Their decayed joints locked into place like rusted iron hasps. They dragged him downward with relentless leverage.
The freezing canal water surged up past his knees, reaching the hem of his oilcloth apron.
The cold was abnormal. It wasn’t the biting chill of autumn river water. It was the rancid, marrow-piercing Yin-frost of an open tomb. It soaked through his trousers. Then, the heat slope threatened to stall the blood circulating through his lower limbs.
Inside his chest, the body-energy fire flickered.
A sudden warning spike flashed through his nervous system:
If his blood heat dropped below thirty-eight degrees, the hardened melted rock waste veins in his left arm would freeze into brittle glass. The melted rock waste froze. Then, a single hard impact would shatter the vessels, causing massive internal hemorrhaging.
He stopped pulling. Fighting the suction wasted energy and compacted the silt.
He took a deep, deliberate breath of the rotten-egg night mist.
He closed the vents on his upper spirit veins and directed the entire high-pressure flow of his blood downward, routing the boiling Yang torrent straight into his main thigh blood vessels.
“Burn,” he whispered.
The reaction was instant.
The skin of his calves and shins flushed from slate-gray to a dull, glowing red. The heat streaming through the leather of his boots leaped from forty degrees to past eighty in three seconds.
The mud around his legs began to hiss.
At first, tiny bubbles of foul marsh gas broke the surface around his knees. Then, the entire patch of water within two yards of his thighs began to roil and churn. Thick, greasy white steam erupted from the waterline with the roar of a blacksmith cooling white-hot steel in salt water.
The canal shallows were boiling.
Beneath the surface, the mud ghouls’ decayed flesh was never meant to withstand heat shock. Their jelly-like, waterlogged skin melted into curdled white slime. The fat deposits beneath their hides melted instantly, floating to the surface in smoking, rancid slicks.
The water-leeches and pale river worms nestled in their rotted marrow shrieked as they burst, floating to the surface like grains of scalded rice.
The death-grip around Lu Chen’s ankles dissolved into mush.
With the suction broken by boiling steam, Lu Chen tore his left foot free from the melted mud with an explosive upward heave.
He lunged forward through the scalding broth, his boots churning through two feet of foaming, bubbling silt.
Gale Cleaver.
Through the blinding wall of white steam, his ears caught the wet thrashing of the three leftover creatures trying to swim away from the heat vortex.
He stepped forward, the water parting before his heated legs.
His right arm lashed out. The twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver became a blurred semi-circle of gray iron.
Slash!
The blade caught the nearest fleeing ghoul across the base of its bloated skull. The rotted spine cut with zero pushback, parting like warm animal fat under a hot iron spade. The head flew three paces through the air, tumbling into the reeds with a wet splash.
A second ghoul, its chest crusted with razor-sharp river clams, rose from the boiling foam to spit a jet of black, rotting black bile straight at Lu Chen’s face.
Lu Chen didn’t flinch.
He snapped his head sideways by two inches. That let the acidic stream whistle past his left ear to scorch the reed stalks behind him.
In the same nonstop motion, he drove the square iron butt of the cleaver straight through the creature’s open mouth.
Crunch!
The heavy iron handle knob shattered the ghoul’s jaw, punched through its palate. Then it blew out the back of its neck column. Lu Chen stepped into the strike, seized the creature’s slippery collarbone with his bare left hand. Then he drove its entire bloated torso down into the boiling silt beneath his knee.
The ghoul thrashed once, its cooked flesh tearing apart in the scalded mud, and went limp.
The leftover four ghouls in the deeper water tried to submerge, retreating toward the dark tunnel of the sunken water gate.
Lu Chen reached into his belt pouch with his left hand, grabbed a handful of coarse rock salt and unslaked lime. Then it hurled it into the deeper channel ahead of them.
The moment the lime hit the boiling water, an intense chemical reaction ignited. The pool flared with acrid white smoke, blinding the creatures and scorching their rotted optic nerves.
Lu Chen closed the distance in three violent strides through the shallows.
His cleaver rose and fell with rhythmic, clockwork brutality.
Chop. Pivot. Cleave.
Each stroke was short, precise, and devoid of wasted dramatic motion. Heads separated from torsos. Bloated limbs were shorn cleanly from shoulders. Within thirty seconds, the entire lock basin fell silent, save for the crackling of cooling fat and the steady hiss of steam rising into the freezing night sky.
A dark amber glow ignited in the center of Lu Chen’s vision.
A dense, freezing vortex of black foul fog rose from the floating corpses, drawn inexorably toward Lu Chen’s chest. The icy malice didn’t chill him. It breached his skin. Then, the crucible behind his ribs seized the negative energy, grinding it down into pure fuel.
The dull, exhausted ache in his melted rock waste veins vanished. His blood heat rebounded, settling back at an optimal 40.2 degrees.
Lu Chen leaned over and picked up the cut head of the largest ghoul by its matted river reeds.
The creature’s jaw was locked wide open in a permanent rictus.
Protruding from its throat-pipe, buried deep beneath its rotted tongue, was a thick knot of crimson silk thread.
Lu Chen wiped the hot mud from his fingers and pinched the scarlet strand between his thumb and forefinger. He pulled.
The thread didn’t snap. It was remarkably thin, yet it bore the pulling strength of hardened copper wire.
He tugged harder. Five yards of scarlet thread spooled smoothly out of the creature’s throat, dripping with cold, odorless clear fluid rather than canal muck.
Lu Chen followed the line with his eyes.
The thread didn’t originate from the canal bed. It rose out of the water, ran across the slimy granite stones of the lock embankment. Then it disappeared into a narrow, arched drainage under-road drain made of mossy stonework.
Lu Chen climbed out of the steaming shallows, his wet boots leaving dark prints on the frosty stone.
He followed the under-road drain north.
The stone drainage ditch wound away from the river, passing beneath the low outer earthworks of Black Water County. Lu Chen tracked the taut red thread along the stone lip of the ditch. Then, the surrounding scenery shifted.
The open marshes and willows fell away. In their place rose the crumbling, narrow plaster walls of the county’s western heavy-duty quarter.
West Street.
In daylight, West Street was the county’s economic backbone. Home to fifty family-run textile workshops, dye pits, and the grand guildhalls of the silk weavers who produced ritual tribute robes for the country capital.
Tonight, it was dead.
The scarlet thread ran up the mossy stone curb of the drainage ditch, crossed the dirt alleyway, and stretched directly across the cobblestones toward the western gatehouse.
Lu Chen crouched beside the wooden fence at the alley entrance and reached into his sleeve. He drove the iron awl into the callous of his left palm until the hot sting re-anchored his senses.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
He stood up and looked down the main avenue of West Street.
The wide road was barricaded by eight-foot timber chevaux-de-frise and iron-tipped log barriers. Four iron censers were burning bitter wormwood and sulfur along the outer edge. It sent thick, choking yellow smog into the damp air.
Behind the barricades stood six county court guards wearing mud-stained green coats. They grabbed six-foot iron spears with white-knuckled grips. Not one of them was looking down the road.
All six men were staring straight at the rooftops of the weaver quarter. Their faces were pale as lard, their lips trembling in silent terror.
And right through the middle of their barricade, slipping smoothly between the sharpened wooden stakes without touching the ground, ran the scarlet thread.