The heavy cedar door swung shut behind him with the dull thud of an iron casket lid, sealing out the canal fog.
Inside the workshop of Master Weaver Chen, the pitch-black air was freezing—minus four degrees by his body estimate—and thick with the reek of dried rose petals, stale hair oil, and rotting marrow.
Lu Chen didn’t need his eyes. Beneath the tight bitter pine-resin-soaked blindfold he had knotted across his brow at the threshold, his ears tracked the shifting currents of the hall with clean, steady care.
Four days ago, seven apprentices had failed to report for the dawn muster. The constables peered through the front lattice. Then, they found all seven men suspended three feet above the floorboards, their necks cradled by fine strands of black hair anchored to the central ridgepole.
Don’t look up at the rafters after midnight, Old Meng’s warning whispered in his memory. The thing in the roof feeds on what looks back.
The fresh puncture in his left palm from his four-inch iron bone awl throbbed with grounding, deliberate pain. His blood fire burned steadily at 40.2 degrees, his slate-veined spirit veins humming with cold readiness. He was Lu Chen, third-class dead-house laborer of the Seventh Ward. His boots were already planted on the killing floor.
The wooden floorboards beneath his iron-shod boots groaned with waterlogged rot, yielding slightly under his balanced martial stance.
Without sight, his other senses sharpened instantly.
Air currents dragged across his exposed skin. The draft entered through the shattered front lattice, coiled around three massive wooden shuttle looms in the central hall. Then it stalled against the far wall where the old family partition stood.
Clack.
The sound was faint, dry, and rhythmic.
Clack. Shhk. Clack.
Thirty paces ahead, a foot pedal was depressing against hardwood. A shuttle flew across an empty warp beam. The loom was running in the dark without a mortal hand to guide it.
Lu Chen took three measured paces forward. His boots moved silently over the grit-covered floorboards, his balance point lowered, weight balanced evenly on the balls of his feet.
Something brushed his left cheek.
It was finer than silk thread. It possessed the oily, brittle texture of human hair, cold as river ice.
Lu Chen didn’t turn his head. Even behind the double-folded blindfold. His gaze remained firmly was locked on the level of his own navel.
Ten strands across the left ear. Five brushing the collar.
The hair didn’t strike right away. It drifted on the stale air like underwater pond weeds, testing his outer edge, seeking bare flesh. Wherever the strands touched his skin, tiny needles of Yin-frost burrowed toward his tiny blood vessels, attempting to numb the nerves and slow his pulse.
In an ordinary martial artist, the frost would have congealed the blood within seconds. It locked the neck muscles in place before the noose tightened.
Lu Chen’s body was not ordinary.
Deep within his chest cavity, the Asura Crucible flared. The melted rock waste-veins running along his collarbone pulsed with dull heat, raising his local epidermal heat to forty-one degrees.
The frost touching his skin didn’t freeze him. It boiled away.
A faint hiss of steam drifted from his collar, carrying the sharp scent of singed horn-protein.
The clicking of the loom stopped dead.
The silence that followed was total. The draft through the floorboards ceased. The air grew heavy, thick with the weight of hundreds of suspended pounds hanging directly above his skull.
The hair above him shifted.
It wasn’t a few loose strands anymore. It was an entire canopy. Thousands of fine filaments dropped silently from the ceiling rafters, parting around his shoulders like a falling curtain of black water.
They touched his oilcloth apron. They wrapped around his forearms.
Then they tightened.
The pulling pull was sudden and violent. Over four hundred pounds of upward crushing force seized his limbs, attempting to yank him off his feet and haul his neck toward the central rafter. The hair cords bit into his wrists and throat with the shearing edge of iron wire.
Lu Chen absorbed the violent pull.
His heels drove into the floorboards. The oak planks splintered under his heels as he anchored his weight, shifting his balance point into his hips.
Ox-Demon Iron Skin: Max.
His deep skin hardened to the thickness of cold slate. The constricting hair dug into his skin. But instead of slicing through his neck-vein, the filaments groaned under impossible pushback, unable to penetrate the hardened outer layer of his flesh.
“Too light,” Lu Chen murmured under his breath.
His right hand reached behind his back. Fingers wrapped around the coarse hemp-wrapped handle of the notched ox-bone cleaver.
Twelve pounds of forged iron slid from the leather back-sheath with a clean, rasping scrape.
He held the cleaver back from blind slashing. Random blade work against incorporeal specters wasted stamina and dulled iron edges. Cold steel passed through Yin-constructs without leaving a scratch.
He needed a heat-powered spark.
Lu Chen raised his left palm to the blade’s notched spine. He squeezed the fresh puncture from the iron bone awl, smearing a thick line of forty-degree Yang blood along the entire eighteen-inch length of the iron cutter.
His internal fire surged. He channeled a pulse of packed breath along the melted rock waste-veins of his right forearm, dumping heat energy directly into the iron.
Fwoosh!
The blood along the blade didn’t merely smoke. It caught fire.
A sputtering, deep-crimson flame erupted along the spine of the cleaver, crackling with the violent hiss of boiling marrow. The heat lit up the workshop in stark flashes of orange light, casting long, twisting shadows across the abandoned looms.
The hair wrapped around his right arm shrieked.
It wasn’t a voice. It was the collective friction of thousands of burning strands snapping under extreme heat shock. The filaments charred instantly, turning into brittle black ash that scattered across his chest.
Lu Chen pivoted on his left heel.
His hearing tracked the rapid recoil of the strands above him. The mass was withdrawing toward the ceiling, bundling together into thick ropes, preparing a second constriction from the blind spot behind his neck.
He stepped forward. One pace. Two paces.
He swung the flaming cleaver in a savage, rising slanted arc.
Gale Cleaver: First Form.
The iron blade split through the darkness. The crimson flame drew a blinding crescent through the air, shearing through a cluster of fifty hair cords with the sound of snapping bowstrings.
A high-pitched, warbling screech tore through the rafters above.
A shower of black, oily droplets rained down upon the floorboards, sizzling like boiling animal fat where they struck the wood. The entire wooden frame of the weaver hall shuddered as something massive and tangled shifted among the crossbeams.
Above him, the dry pine rafters groaned under crushing weight, beginning to split.
Lu Chen held his ground beneath the cloth blindfold, the cleaver burning hot in his grip.
“Come down,” he whispered.