Steel hissed through the stale air, aimed straight for Lu Chen’s exposed collarbone.
The duplicate moved without pause. It had registered Lu Chen’s lowered guard as a fatal lapse in defensive stance. He drove all its weight forward in a textbook execution of Gale Cleaver.
Lu Chen left his own blade hanging.
He took half a step forward, closing the distance between them by eight inches.
Deep inside the base of his spine, the sleeping crucible woke with a sound like iron smelting gates being kicked off their hinges.
Overclock.
He opened the heat-powered valves of his central spirit vein. That forced raw Yang essence and raw heat energy directly into his bloodstream.
The heat didn’t build gradually. It blew up.
His blood heat spiked from forty-one degrees past fifty in a single heartbeat.
Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty-five.
It redlined at seventy point zero degrees.
The agony was instant and savage.
Every backup spirit vein along Lu Chen’s chest and arms felt as though liquid bronze were being pumped through glass tubes. The hardened melted rock waste-veins under his skin didn’t merely ache. They began to glow a dull cherry red through his leather apron.
White steam blasted outward from the pores of his neck and knuckles. It hissed like a burst boiler in the freezing hall.
The duplicate’s cleaver struck Lu Chen’s left palm.
Lu Chen had reached out and caught the blade bare-handed.
SKRRRRT!
There was no sound of flesh parting. There was only the violent shriek of heat shock.
At seventy degrees, the human palm was hot enough to scald pig hide in seconds.
The sub-zero Yin frost encrusting the duplicate’s iron blade didn’t bite into bone. The frozen metal touched Lu Chen’s palm. Then, the frost flash-boiled into a burst of white-hot steam.
The duplicate’s milky eyes widened.
For the first time since it had stepped from the glass, its mimicry broke down. It had copied Lu Chen’s skeletal dimensions, his muscle mass, and his cold resting state.
It hadn’t copied an internal heat-powered fire roaring at the edge of living collapse.
“You copied the meat,” Lu Chen whispered, his voice dry as cinder. “Not the fire.”
Lu Chen closed his left fist.
The sheer torque of his Molten Tiger Vajra grip bent the duplicate’s iron cleaver inward at a thirty-degree angle.
Before the thing could pull back, Lu Chen drove his right hand forward, fingers locking around the duplicate’s gray throat like iron tongs fresh from a blacksmith’s forge.
TSSTTTTTT!
The sound of burning fat filled the old family hall.
Seventy-degree heat passed directly from Lu Chen’s calloused palm into the duplicate’s neck.
The waterlogged, corpse-cold tissue didn’t resist. It began to blister, char, and crack like cheap lard dropped onto a red-hot griddle.
The duplicate opened its mouth to screech. But no sound escaped except the violent hiss of boiling moisture.
Its stolen Ox-Demon Iron Skin turned brittle under the extreme heat swelling. Black fissures raced across its cheeks and chest, flaking away into clouds of greasy soot.
Lu Chen twisted his hip and drove all his mass downward. It slammed the duplicate into the flat stone slabs.
The stone cracked beneath the impact.
Lu Chen’s right knee came down on the duplicate’s chest bone. The seventy-degree heat from his leg melted clean through the duplicate’s leather apron. That turned its chest cavity into smoking cinders.
With a final shudder of collapsing Yin malice, the duplicate dissolved fully. That left behind only a puddle of boiling black grease and two twisted iron notches.
There was no time to catch his breath.
His internal clock counted fifty-one seconds leftover on the overclock limit. His vision was already tunneling with gray spots as his heat reserves boiled away.
On the stone altar, the Whispering Bronze Mirror shrieked.
Deprived of its physical channel, the mirror began to cry streams of foul black liquid silver from its green rust frame. The swirling vortex on its surface spun wildly, trying to pull the old family hall’s shadows into itself to rebuild its defenses.
Lu Chen turned his head.
Leaning against the stonework pillar three paces to his left was an eighty-pound stone-breaking hammer. A relic left behind by the masons who had sealed the hall thirty years ago. Its iron head was as wide as a horse’s skull, pitted with rust.
Lu Chen stepped over the puddle of grease, his boots smoking against the damp flags.
He reached down with both hands and clamped onto the ash-wood wooden handle.
The wood groaned under his seventy-degree grip, thin ribbons of smoke curling from where his fingers touched the grain.
He didn’t lift with his spine. He sank into his hips, engaged his glutes and lats. Then he hoisted the eighty-pound mass of iron onto his right shoulder in a single, fluid arc.
“Quiet,” Lu Chen said.
He stepped onto the altar steps.
With a deep-throated breath out of scalding steam, Lu Chen pivoted his entire torso. It whipped the eighty-pound hammer downward with the full turning force of the Molten Tiger Vajra.
BOOOOOOM!
The iron hammer smashed dead-center into the face of the Whispering Bronze Mirror.
The sound was not that of breaking glass. It was the thunderous explosion of a bronze bell being struck by a siege ram.
A blast wave of stale air and crushed stone blasted outward, blowing the leftover paper screens from the hall windows.
The royal bronze face of the mirror buckled, inverted. Then he blew up into dozens of jagged, green rust-crusted shards that buried themselves three inches deep into the surrounding timber pillars.
The whispering voices didn’t fade. They were torn to shreds, snuffed out like grease lamps in a hurricane.
The amber letters burned into Lu Chen’s eyes, solid and golden.
A pouring flood of cold, purified malice poured out from the shattered bronze fragments, rushing through the air and sinking directly into the crucible in Lu Chen’s belly.
The cooling sensation was violent.
The 70.0°C overclock disengaged like a snapped bowstring.
Lu Chen stumbled back two paces, his boots heavy as lead.
His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto one knee beside the altar, coughing wildly. A mouthful of dark, clotted blood spattered across the stone floor.
His body heat plummeted with terrifying speed. From seventy degrees down to forty, then thirty-nine, shivering wildly as freezing shock threatened to stall his blood.
His backup spirit veins felt like dry riverbeds paved with broken black glass.
“Fuel,” Lu Chen rasped between clenched teeth.
With trembling fingers, he tore open the oiled pouch at his hip and hauled out a six-ounce block of dried sheep-animal fat cake mixed with coarse salt.
He shoved half the greasy, cold fat into his mouth without chewing. That forced himself to swallow the clotted animal fat down his dry gullet.
Swallow. Burn.
The raw animal fat hit his stomach. The crucible flared back to life, seizing the animal fats and converting the calories into a steady, warming tide of blood life-force that pushed his blood heat back to its safe baseline of forty point two degrees.
Lu Chen leaned his head against the cold stonework pillar.
He took out his four-inch iron bone awl and drove it half an inch into the callous of his left thumb.
Pain flared. Blood dripped.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
The shivering stopped. His breathing slowed to a steady pace.
He looked down at the floor.
Lying among the debris were five massive fragments of the shattered mirror. They were thick as horse hooves, heavy. It hummed with leftover ancient copper ore and spirit thickness.
In Black Water County, oddity fragments were worth hundreds of silver coins to demonic graft-clans and martial sects seeking to forge cursed weapons.
Lu Chen unfastened a sheet of coarse oilcloth from his pack and gathered the heavy bronze shards, binding them tight with hemp twine.
He hoisted the thirty-pound bundle onto his back, picked up his notched ox-bone cleaver. Then he stepped out of the ruined hall into the gray mist of early dawn.
Three leagues away, in the East District.
Inside the sprawling martial yard of the Iron Fist School, Master Tie Shan stood before thirty students lined up in double ranks.
Tie Shan’s sleeveless tiger-hide vest stretched tight over a chest broad as an anvil. His walnut-sized calloused knuckles were coated in red iron sand as he gripped a heavy wooden training post.
A breathless scout knelt in the mud before him.
“Master! The dead-house boy came out of West Street alive!” the scout gasped. “The mirror broke! He’s carrying the cursed bronze on his back right now, heading back to the Seventh Ward morgue!”
Tie Shan smiled, exposing yellowed teeth.
His calloused hand closed around the training post. With a sharp twist of his iron wrist, the four-inch timber snapped like a dry twig.
“Thirty men,” Tie Shan boomed, his voice rumbling like summer thunder. “Take iron rods and torches. We take the bronze, and we take that dead-house dog’s hands.”