Lu Chen’s first step shook the foundation of the old family altar.
His iron-shod boot dropped upon a slab of gray river granite. The stone was damp, cold from three days of canal fog. His sole made contact. Then, the trapped moisture within the porous rock flashed into white-hot steam.
Tssssss!
A sharp hiss spat from beneath his boot. The granite turned chalk-white, spider-webbed with hairline heat fractures. Then it cracked with the dry pop of green timber on a kiln grate.
When he lifted his heel, the stone bore a blackened, scorched footprint.
The air within two paces of his body bent and wavered in visible heat ripples. The stink of singed horn-protein had been replaced by something harsher, cleaner, and infinitely more dangerous. The dry, choking scent of baked limestone and molten iron.
Lu Chen paused. He rotated his left shoulder joint.
The high-pressure tension was huge. The Molten Tiger Vajra Body had not merely heavy his outer deep skin. It had converted his entire musculoskeletal framework into a high-pressure steam piston. Every bundle of muscle fiber along his lats and shoulder muscles felt tightly packed, dense as hammered pig iron. It shook with a dull, underground hum.
Blood Heat: fifty-five degrees. High-pressure torque: four thousand pounds. Body balance: ninety-four percent.
He didn’t need to draw breath often. His lungs absorbed oxygen with the ferocious smooth speed of a blast fire. He exhaled only short, white jets of high-pressure vapor from his nostrils.
Before him, the Whispering Bronze Mirror convulsed.
The spreader tool glass had bulged five inches beyond the circular bronze rim, stretching like rotten gut before tearing with a wet, sucking sound.
A figure tumbled out of the mirror’s surface.
It hit the cracked floorboards in a three-point stance, its joints popping in reverse. When it stood, Lu Chen found himself looking at his own dark shape.
The creature possessed his height. It possessed the corded breadth of his shoulders, the coarse hemp wrappings around its knuckles. The twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver resting in its right grip.
Yet it was dead.
Its skin was the color of curdled animal fat, mottled with livid post-mortem bruising. Its eyes were two flat discs of polished black glass that reflected neither moonlight nor flame. And the air pouring off its limbs was not the fifty-five-degree heat of a living fire. But a deep-sea, sub-zero frost that turned the draft in the room into drifting needles of ice.
Taboo Rule: The mirror crafts a corpse-double of the slayer, perfectly mimicking the physical weight of mortal flesh.
The double didn’t speak. It didn’t breathe.
It lunged.
The gaining speed was instant. The floorboards beneath its frost-rimed boots didn’t crack. They froze solid, shattering into brittle crystal-clear ice as the creature crossed eight paces in the space of half a heartbeat.
Gale Cleaver: Third Form—Severing the Mountain.
The shadow cleaver rose in a savage slanted arc aimed straight at Lu Chen’s left collar bone. The blade carried the exact twelve-hundred-pound impact Lu Chen had used to execute the Loom Hair-Specter moments before.
Lu Chen held his ground, unmoving. He kept his own weapon lowered at his hip.
He planted his front foot. He drove his heel into the granite flat stone slabs with enough downward pressure to pulverize the slate beneath. He raised his left forearm horizontally, meeting the dropping iron blade with bare skin.
Clang!
The impact was not the wet parting of flesh or the dull thud of bone.
It was the ear-splitting, metal shriek of a twelve-pound sledgehammer striking a solid bronze metal bar at full swing.
Blast waves rippled outward through the air, blowing the ash of the burned hair-specter into violent whirlpools across the floor. The floorboards beneath Lu Chen’s boots grooved outward, but his forearm didn’t yield by a single tiny fraction of an inch.
The charcoal tiger stripes along his skin flared dull orange.
The shadow cleaver—forged of mirror-malice and frost—shattered on contact. Dozens of black, glassy shards exploded into the air, dissolving into greasy soot before they hit the ground.
The double’s black glass eyes widened in something resembling shock.
The entity’s physical hardware had copied Lu Chen’s mass, his stance, and his Ox-Demon Iron Skin.
It hadn’t copied the Asura Crucible. It couldn’t replicate a fifty-five-degree internal fire.
“Cold copy,” Lu Chen said.
His left hand snapped forward like an iron bear trap, clamping down around the double’s right wrist.
The contact was total for the specter.
Sssssssssss!
Fifty-five degrees of packed Yang heat, pumped through hardened black glass melted rock waste-veins, slammed into the double’s frozen tissue. The dead, animal fat-white skin on the creature’s wrist boiled on contact. Black rotting grease bubbled from the pores, evaporating into thick, foul-smelling steam that hissed against the ceiling.
The double opened its mouth to screech, but Lu Chen had already shifted his hips.
His right arm cocked back. The muscles across his chest and shoulder knotted into dense cables of bronze sinew. The air behind his fist distorted in a violent heat mirage.
Molten Tiger Vajra Fist.
No cleaver was necessary. Flesh reached the thickness of forged bronze and the heat of a kiln. Then, the human knuckle was deadlier than cold steel.
The punch drove forward in a straight, uncompromising line.
It struck the double dead center in the chest bone.
Boom!
The sound was not an impact. It was a blast.
The bone-shaking force blew a cone-shaped blast wave through the creature’s back, tearing through the cedar old family partition behind it and blowing a six-foot hole straight through the workshop’s rear lath-and-plaster wall.
The double’s chest didn’t merely cave in. The intense heat transfer ignited the shadow-flesh from within.
Orange fire burst from its eyes, its nostrils, and the gaping cavity in its ribs. The entity collapsed into a shrieking vortex of burning ash, its crumbled essence dragged backward through the air like iron filings pulled toward a lodestone, sucked wildly back into the frame of the Whispering Bronze Mirror.
The bronze mirror shrieked.
A deep, jagged crack ran down the center of the spreader tool glass, splitting the shiny surface from top to bottom. A thick dribble of black, curdled fluid leaked from the fissure, pooling upon the cedar altar like spoiled marrow.
Lu Chen lowered his fist.
He looked down at his right knuckles. The skin was unbroken, dusted only with a fine layer of gray soot. A faint line of steam curled from the crease between his index and middle fingers. It drained away into the cold night draft.
Slamming smooth speed: ninety-eight percent. Bone recoil: negligible.
The test was complete. The Molten Tiger Vajra Body had turned his mortal frame into a living weapon capable of shattering Uncanny oddities with bare fists.
Before he could reach forward to smash the bronze frame to dust, a harsh, clashing noise cut through the fog outside the ruined workshop.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
It was the heavy, rhythmic beat of iron night gongs, echoing from both ends of West Street.
“Close the alley!” a harsh voice barked from fifty paces away, with the thud of iron-shod boots. “The smoke is coming from Master Chen’s weaving house!”
“Tie Shan says the dead-house cur is trapped inside,” the voice shouted. “Take his hands, take his legs, and leave the throat for the Hall Master!”
Dozens of torch flames flickered through the broken wooden lattices of the workshop, casting long, jittery orange bars of light across the scorched floorboards.
Old Meng’s hoarse, raspy shout echoed faintly from the mouth of the alley. He was followed by the dull, sickening thud of an iron heavy club striking ribs and an old man’s muffled grunt.
Lu Chen’s eyes narrowed.
The underground amber glow beneath his charcoal tiger stripes darkened to a deep, dangerous crimson. The heat streaming from his collar surged, scorching the hem of his leather apron.
With his left hand, Lu Chen hooked his fingers into the heavy bronze rim of the cracked Whispering Mirror. He lifted the ten-pound relic from its cedar altar. His right hand scooped the notched ox-bone cleaver from the ashes.
“Old Meng,” Lu Chen whispered, his voice quiet, flat, and cold.
He crossed the smoking floor in two strides. He closed on the shattered doorway. Torchlight flared through the mist outside and the first iron gong struck like a war drum.