Four strokes rang from the iron bell in the county watchtower.
The hollow, brassy echo rolled through the yellow smog over West Street. It shook the roof tiles of the Grand Weaver Guildhall.
Midnight had arrived.
Inside the hall, the clatter of the wooden loom grew faster.
Thump-clack. Thump-clack.
The rhythm was relentless, like the galloping of an iron-shod pony over cobblestones. With every stroke of the unseen shuttle, the smell drifting through the lattice shifted. The stale rose perfume decayed into the greasy reek of rancid scalp oil and cold, underground mildew.
High in the rafters, the woman’s humming ceased.
In its place came a wet, sliding rasp—the sound of ten thousand strands of human hair dragging slowly across dry cedar beams.
Old Meng’s gnarled fingers clamped around Lu Chen’s upper arm.
The old watchman’s grip was surprisingly strong, but his knuckles trembled. His single yellow eye was wide, fixed on the stone steps beneath their feet. He refused to wander even an inch toward the ornate roofline.
“Boy,” Old Meng rasped. His voice dropped to a harsh whisper that barely carried over the sulfur fire bowls. “Listen to me.”
Lu Chen didn’t turn his head. “I’m listening.”
Old Meng pulled the battered tin flask from his coat, took a ragged swallow of sulfur liquor. Then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Never look up at the ceiling beams after midnight,” Old Meng said.
The words were spoken with the solemn weight of an epitaph.
Lu Chen glanced sideways at the old soldier. “What lives in the beams?”
“The first weaver,” Old Meng muttered. “Thirty years ago, during the Great Flood, a royal concubine was exiled to Black Water County by the inner court.”
“The eunuchs didn’t use a silk cord to choke her,” the old man rasped. “They tied her own hair to the high rafters and kicked the bench away.”
Old Meng spat into the dirt. The spit was thick and yellow.
“Her resentment never seeped into the soil,” the old man continued. “It climbed upward, soaking into the dry cedar beams until the oddity wrote a single law.”
“The gaze,” Lu Chen said.
“Aye,” Old Meng said, his jaw tightening. “The moment your pupils reflect the roof beams in the dark, the hair knows you see it.”
“It drops straight into your eyes,” Old Meng warned. “Pierces the sockets, winds around the brain, and hooks into the jaw before you can scream.”
Old Meng tapped his hickory heavy club on the flat stone slabs.
“Looking is dying,” the old man rasped. “Keep your chin against your collarbone.”
“If you hear a voice calling your childhood name from above, stare at your toes,” Old Meng added. “If you look up, you become the eighth.”
Lu Chen lowered his head slightly. He stared at the granite threshold where the crimson thread disappeared under the door.
His mind processed the old watchman’s warning with cold, test care.
It wasn’t a physical curse that spread through airborne spores or rotting venom. It was a sight-trigger strange flaw.
The specter’s murder rule needed visual recognition. The human eye was the lens. The glow upon the eye served as the spirit anchor. Once the target completed the line of sight, the spatial binding carried out without delay.
A subtle amber window flickered in the lower corner of his field of vision:
The system confirmed the analysis.
If the taboo needed the eye to reflect the beams, the counter-measure was brutally simple: remove the eye from the equation.
Lu Chen reached into his leather belt pouch. He pulled out the small paper packet of coarse sea salt mixed with crushed unslaked lime and loosened the hemp string, securing it to his left hip for immediate access.
He reached into his sleeve.
The four-inch iron bone awl slid into his left palm. Lu Chen drove the square point firmly into the thick callous beneath his thumb until fresh, boiling-hot blood welled along the dark iron.
The sharp flare of physical pain rooted his nervous system to his flesh.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
He pulled another sliver of dried sheep fat from his pouch and chewed it slowly. That let the high-thickness fat melt down his throat to stoke the embers in his chest. His internal core steadied at exactly 40.2 degrees.
His Ox-Demon Iron Skin was dense enough to resist blades and teeth. But soft tissues like corneas and optic nerves possessed zero defensive threshold against hair-thin penetrative attacks. In close combat within the hall, a single reflexive upward glance would be fatal.
Human reflexes were instinctual. If a corpse dropped or a beam creaked overhead, the eyes naturally flicked toward the threat.
To defeat a sight rule, one couldn’t rely on willpower.
One had to eliminate the sense organ entirely.
Lu Chen reached down to the hem of his dead-house apron. He took the heavy ox-bone cleaver and hooked the notched spine beneath the seam of the coarse, oil-soaked black linen.
Rip.
A four-inch-wide strip of heavy black fabric tore free in his left hand.
Lu Chen folded the linen strip twice. That created a thick, iron-hard band of dense black cloth smelling of sheep fat, salt, and stale vinegar.
Old Meng stared at him with his single yellow eye, his brow furrowing into deep, weathered furrows. “What are you doing, boy?”
“Cutting the thread,” Lu Chen said.
“You can’t fight in the dark!” Old Meng hissed, his hand reaching out to grab the cloth. “There are seven corpses hanging in there!”
“There are twenty looms of heavy hardwood,” the old man rasped. “You’ll stumble like a drunkard and break your neck!”
“Eyes are a weakness,” Lu Chen said calmly.
He didn’t argue. He lifted the folded linen band to his face. He pressed the fabric firmly across his eyelids, and pulled both ends behind the crown of his skull.
He tied the knot tight.
Instant, complete darkness swallowed him.
Not a single photon pierced the double-folded, oil-cured dead-house cloth. The yellow smog, the dim torchlight from the barricades, and the looming dark shape of the guildhall vanished.
In the total blackness, his other senses flared with heightened clarity.
He heard the faint, wheezing rattle of Old Meng’s damaged lungs three paces to his left. He heard the sulfur coals crackling in the copper fire bowl forty feet behind them.
Most importantly, he felt the air currents against his skin.
His blood heat was running at over forty degrees. To his heightened body awareness, the surrounding cold air was not empty space. It was a dense fluid. The chilling, stale draft leaking from the gaps in the guildhall doors felt like ice water trickling against the bare skin of his throat.
Any movement inside the hall would disturb that heat balance like a stone dropped into a calm pond.
He didn’t need eyes to locate cold meat.
Lu Chen shifted the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver into a forward low guard, the heavy iron spine resting near his right hip.
His left boot rose.
The thick leather sole stepped onto the first granite step of the porch.
Creak.
He reached out his left hand, his calloused palm touching the cold, damp cedar of the double doors.
He applied thirty pounds of pressure.
The ancient iron hinges groaned—a long, dry shriek that cut through the silence of the sealed street like a rusty blade drawn across bone.
The door swung inward.
A blast of freezing, corpse-scented air billowed out of the hall, smelling of dried rose petals, stale hair oil, and rotting marrow.
From high above in the pitch-black rafters, the sliding rustle of ten thousand strands of black hair intensified into an eager, dropping hiss.
Blindfolded and streaming the heat of an iron kiln, Lu Chen crossed the threshold as the first frozen tendrils whipped through the dark, hunting for his eyes.