Lu Chen kept his line of sight thirty degrees off-axis.
He didn’t look directly into the bronze glass. Rule number two of the Watchman’s Primer was written in the dried blood of twenty ages of county court guards: Never greet a mirror in a dead man’s house.
The altar before him was carved from rotting cedar, sagging under the weight of three hundred human back teeth arranged in nested sharp-angled circles. At the center of this grim mandala sat the mirror.
Its circular bronze frame was ten inches across, green with thick crusts of green rust, bordered by headless serpents biting each other’s tails. The shiny surface was not glass, but polished spreader tool metal. It shone with a greasy, eerie-glowing sheen that made the shadows behind it twist like drowning worms.
The whispers continued.
They weren’t traveling through the air. The sound shook directly along Lu Chen’s time bones, a chaotic murmur of overlapping voices. It was old women gasping for water, children crying in sealed cellars, men choking on red silk threads.
Turn your head... See what remains of you... The grave is warm...
Lu Chen ignored the voices.
His left hand moved with clean, steady care. He reached inside his sleeve, drew the iron bone awl. Then he pressed the blunt point into the fresh scab on his left palm. He drove it down until the skin parted and dark, thick crimson welled to the surface.
The sharp sting cut through the mental hum in his frontal lobe.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
The whispering faded to a dull, background hiss, like damp wood placed near a forge fire.
Lu Chen analyzed the situation with cold, test calm distance.
The Loom Hair-Specter was merely an external appendage—a hound on a spirit leash. The true source of the West Street Hangings was this Corrupted Oddity.
In this world, Oddities were far deadlier than common specters. Specters possessed physical weaknesses. They could be burned with Yang blood, crushed with heavy mass, or dissolved with salt and sulfur.
An Oddity was bound to a total rule. If an ordinary mortal violated its taboo, no amount of muscle or mundane steel could prevent the resulting bodily collapse. To destroy the vessel, one needed enough spirit heat and crushing force to shatter the curse before the rule could resolve.
His current physical hardware was not enough.
Ox-Demon Iron Skin gave him the thickness of cold slate, shielding him from physical blades and blunt trauma. Gale Cleaver gave him explosive cutting speed. But neither art was designed to generate the sustained, blistering heat output needed to burn up an ancient curse from the Great Yong era.
He needed greater heat capacity.
Deep within his chest cavity, the Asura Crucible pulsed in response to the nearby malice strange flaw. The amber tracking data haze shifted across his eyes, projecting crisp lines of ancient script.
Lu Chen reviewed his current reserves.
One thousand and twenty Malice units. The harvest from Lady Yan, the frost-wisps of the willow marsh, the Iron Fist School guards, the canal water-ghouls, and tonight’s hair-specter had filled his pool to the brim.
There was no reason to hoard fuel in a slaughterhouse.
Execute extrapolation, Lu Chen commanded mentally.
The Crucible didn’t merely activate. It blew up.
A sound like an iron fire door being kicked off its hinges roared inside his skull.
The Phantom Agony Syndrome struck instantly. It wasn’t a physical wound. It was the raw, nerve shock of a simulated breakthrough being wildly stamped into living meat.
Every nerve ending along his spine felt as though it were being dipped in molten lead. The hardened melted rock waste-veins along his collarbone and forearms groaned under tremendous internal pressure.
Lu Chen’s knees buckled.
He caught himself against the stone rim of the ruined loom, fingers sinking an inch into waterlogged oak. Screaming wasted oxygen and loosened the chest muscle.
He clamped his teeth shut until his gums bled, forcing his breath into a slow, rhythmic intake.
Breathe. Three counts in. Three counts hold.
Inside his torso, the deepest stonework of his spirit veins was being dismantled and reconstructed.
The defense of Ox-Demon Iron Skin and the razor speed of Gale Cleaver were melting together. The slate-like thickness of his deep skin didn’t simply harden—it sank deeper, fusing with his muscle wrapping, wrapping around his thigh bone and upper arm bone like hammered bronze plate.
His backup spirit veins burned away. Where soft, fragile flesh once channeled qi, the searing heat hardened the pathways into rigid black glass tubes.
Thick, dark-charcoal striations rose to the surface of his skin, coiling across his forearms, neck, and broad shoulders like the stripes of a hungry tiger.
Then came the heat spike.
Lu Chen’s resting blood heat—held at a feverish forty point two degrees for the past month—shattered its upper limit.
Forty-five degrees. Fifty degrees. Fifty-five degrees.
His blood had become boiling stone soup.
Tssshhhhh!
An ear-splitting hiss of escaping steam erupted from every pore of his upper torso. The coarse linen of his dead-house shirt charred, smoldering into blackened rags before crumbling entirely.
The surrounding frost coating the altar melted in a heartbeat. Streams of water cascaded from the cedar planks, sizzling wildly as they touched his bare boots.
Lu Chen gasped. The air entering his lungs felt ice-cold by comparison, superheating within his chest before billowing out of his mouth in a thick, nonstop plume of white vapor.
His stomach gave a violent, hollow cramp.
The body-energy burn of maintaining a fifty-five-degree core fire was total. His stored energy stores were fully empty in five seconds.
Without pause, Lu Chen reached into his work pouch. He pulled out a hard, greasy brick of dried sheep fat, cured with rock salt and mountain pepper.
He shoved half a pound of cold fat into his mouth, chewing mechanically with powerful jaw muscles. The animal fat melted against his scalding tongue. Then he slid down his gullet, feeding instant heat fuel directly into his burning belly.
The dizziness subsided.
Lu Chen straightened his spine. He was six feet one inch tall. But now his muscular dark shape appeared broader, denser, corded with sinew that looked less like human flesh and more like braided hemp soaked in molten pitch. The charcoal-black tiger stripes along his arms pulsed with a dull, underground amber glow.
In front of him, the Whispering Bronze Mirror shuddered.
The sudden, overwhelming wave of pure Yang heat had disrupted the Yin-dominated domain of the workshop. The green eerie glow along the bronze glass began to warp and boil.
The voices changed.
The seductive murmurs of dead women and weeping children vanished, replaced by a single, high-pitched, furious screech that echoed through the spreader tool metal.
Inside the dark depths of the mirror, the murky glow was no longer passive.
A shadowy dark shape began to rise through the dark bronze glass. It had Lu Chen’s height. It had Lu Chen’s broad shoulders and the outline of his heavy cleaver.
The shadow pressed two gray, waterlogged palms against the inside of the glass. The spreader tool metal rippled like liquid animal fat, stretching outward into the room. Straining until the bronze rim shrieked under the pressure of what was tearing through.
Lu Chen raised the burning cleaver, his knuckles white against the hemp wrap.
“Time to break the glass,” he said softly.