Rain over Black Water County tasted of soot and wet ash.
In the muddy alleyway outside the Seventh Ward Mortuary, thirty torches sputtered under the freezing drizzle. The yellow flames threw greasy, shuddering reflections across thirty iron-banded cudgels and thirty pairs of hostile eyes.
Old Meng lay crumpled in the gray slush against the brick foundation.
His dented brass gong rolled into a ditch. His boiled leather eye patch had been torn away, exposing the puckered, scarred socket to the sleet. Dark frothy blood seeped past his cracked yellow teeth with every hitching gasp.
“Old dog,” Master Tie Shan sneered, spitting into the slush. “Thirty years you walked this beat, thinking a brass gong could turn back the Iron Fist School.”
The Hall Master stood massive in soaked tiger hide. Knuckles calloused into walnut knobs from decades of pounding iron filings and boiling lead.
Old Meng coughed, clutching his ribs. “Court guard... Won’t let you... Burn this ward...”
“The Guard drinks sheep broth bought with my silver,” Tie Shan boomed. “In this county, the living pay me taxes, and the dead pay me rent. Bring out the dead-house whelp. Break his shins. If he resists, drown him in the canal.”
Two students stepped forward with billhooks.
Before their boots crossed the gutter, the dead-house doors swung open.
No wild shouting came from within. No weapon was drawn in panic.
Lu Chen stepped across the wet threshold.
He wore his coarse linen tunic beneath a heavy oilcloth apron stiffened with beef animal fat and rock salt. The cold rain hit his bare throat and right away boiled away, curling into thin white plumes of steam that drifted into the dark.
His charcoal-black melted rock waste veins pulsed beneath the skin of his left forearm, throbbing like cooled fiery glass under an iron draft.
Inside his chest cavity, the blood heat was idling at a calm forty-eight degrees.
Lu Chen looked at Old Meng lying in the mire. He noted the uneven rise of the old watchman’s ribs and the dark-blood hue of the blood pooling under his jaw.
Left lung punctured. Under-skin emphysema beginning.
Lu Chen shifted his gaze toward the towering martial master.
“Step away from the old man,” Lu Chen said.
His voice was quiet, flat, and devoid of tremor, barely carrying over the sound of rain tapping on wooden shingles.
A harsh bark of laughter erupted from the circle of students.
“Listen to the corpse-boy!” a senior apprentice mocked, tapping a spiked iron mace against his palm. “He spent three years scraping boils off drowned whores. Now he thinks he has iron bones!”
Master Tie Shan didn’t laugh right away. His hungry, small eyes narrowed, taking in the faint curls of steam rising from Lu Chen’s collar.
“You’re the whelp who broke three of my boys’ knees in the butcher alley,” Tie Shan said. He stepped into the center of the muddy street. Each stride pressed deep indentations into the gravel. “They said your skin was hard. They said normal wood couldn’t bruise you.”
Tie Shan raised his right hand.
The skin on his palm was unnatural. Thickened, blackened, and covered in mottled gray scars where boiling lye, copper dust, and crushed scorpions had seared the flesh year after year.
“Mortal laborers don’t know the difference between pig skin and real martial arts,” Tie Shan growled. His voice dropped an octave as his internal Qi began to circulate. “Thirty years I soaked these palms in five-venom vinegar and heated iron sand. At Tier Three, this palm shatters granite millstones and cooks a man’s heart inside his ribs.”
Lu Chen stood motionless, his arms hanging loose at his sides.
“You talk too much,” Lu Chen said.
The insult was delivered without heat, as though stating a mundane autopsy finding.
Tie Shan’s jaw clamped shut. Veins bulged along his neck like twisting earthworms.
“Die, then!”
Tie Shan lunged.
The sheer force of his takeoff blasted two sheets of muddy water into the air behind his boots. He crossed the ten paces of cobblestone in half a breath, his massive torso cutting through the drizzle like an enraged water buffalo.
His right palm whipped forward in a savage, rising slanted thrust.
Air hissed through the gaps between his calloused fingers like steam venting from a high-pressure iron boiler. A pungent stench of sulfur, burnt bone meal, and old lye erupted from the black palm as it zeroed in on Lu Chen’s chest bone.
Iron Sand Palm: Heart-Shattering Forge.
Behind Tie Shan, thirty students cheered in bloodthirsty excitement. They waited for the familiar sound of splintered ribs and the wet eruption of burst lungs.
Lu Chen held his ground. His feet stayed planted. He didn’t even raise his forearms to block.
He lowered his balance point by half an inch, sinking his boots through the surface sludge into the solid mountain stone below.
Extrapolate: Molten Tiger Vajra.
Within his chest, the backup spirit veins—hardened into dense black glass melted rock waste—snapped shut like forge dampers. The blood flowing through his main heart artery surged from forty-eight degrees to seventy degrees in a fraction of a split second.
His chest bone turned the color of dull, heated iron beneath the animal fat apron.
CLANG!
The impact didn’t sound like flesh striking flesh. It sounded like an iron sledgehammer crashing at full speed against a cast-iron temple bell.
A blast wave of displaced air and atomized rainwater rippled outward in a circular ring, splattering mud against the surrounding walls and snuffing out three torches in the front row.
The students’ cheers died in their throats.
Lu Chen’s boots didn’t budge an inch. His shoulders didn’t pitch backward. His breath didn’t hitch.
Tie Shan’s eyes bulged wide.
The Hall Master’s triumphant sneer warped into a look of sheer, blank confusion.
His lethal Iron Sand Palm had struck the center of Lu Chen’s chest with enough force to collapse a brick low roof wall. But instead of traveling through soft muscle and cracking bone, the force rebounded straight into his own wrist bones with violent high-pressure recoil.
And then the heat struck.
It wasn’t the warm Qi of a mortal inner-fighter. It was the blistering, searing radiance of an underground crucible.
HISSSSSSS!
A plume of oily white smoke erupted from the junction where Tie Shan’s right palm was pressed against Lu Chen’s chest.
“Aaaagh!”
Tie Shan let out a high-pitched, porcine squeal.
The thirty years of calloused hide, scorpion venom, and boiled lye that coated his palm provided zero heat padding against seventy-degree Vajra heat. The fat under the skin in his palm boiled instantly, bubbling and liquefying beneath the skin.
With a sickening crackle, the black leather-like skin on Tie Shan’s palm sloughed away like rotten parchment. It melted in running streams of scorched yellow grease.
The flesh seared straight to the bone. White, scorched finger bones and wrist tendons were exposed to the freezing rain, smoking and sizzling against the air.
“My hand! My hand!” Tie Shan shrieked, stumbling backward three drunken paces through the mud.
He cradled his right wrist with his left hand, staring at his ruined edge in wild, animal terror. His fingers were fused together into a blackened, smoking claw of charred bone and weeping marrow.
The thirty students backed away, their boots slipping in the mud, weapons trembling in numb hands.
“A monster...” one student whimpered, his teeth chattering. “He... He ate Master’s palm...”
Lu Chen looked down at his oilcloth apron.
A circular patch of fabric over his breastbone had scorched to dark ash. He showed smooth, slate-colored skin beneath. A faint ring of red heat was already fading back into dull bronze.
Pain level: negligible. Sideways tearing force absorbed: four percent. Heat reserve empty: two ounces of animal fat equivalent.
Tie Shan’s face was drained of all color, drenched in cold sweat and rainwater. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps as agony shredded his mind.
“You... What kind of ghoul are you?” Tie Shan spat, stumbling back another step. His left hand dropped toward the curved hunting dagger strapped to his leather belt. “Kill him! All of you, rush him! Cut off his head!”
Not a single student moved. The men stood numbed in the freezing mud, their eyes fixed on the charred bones of their master’s hand.
Lu Chen took one step forward.
His boot made a clean, deliberate squelch in the mire.
“Thirty years of conditioning,” Lu Chen murmured, his voice level and cold and exact. “Poor heat fading away.”
Tie Shan drew the hunting dagger with his left hand, his face twisting into a mask of desperate frenzy. “Die, demon—”
Lu Chen’s right fist snapped back.
The charcoal melted rock waste-veins along his forearm ignited with dark crimson light. Steam hissed wildly from the pores along his elbow and triceps as the crucible dumped forty pounds of torque directly into his shoulder joint.
One step. One breath.
Piston forward.
The fist took Tie Shan squarely in the center of his tiger-hide vest.
There was no ringing clang this time.
There was only the wet, explosive thud of four hundred pounds of tightly packed bone and muscle collapsing inward at the same time.
Tie Shan’s breastbone imploded like dry pine under a falling boulder. The blast wave punched clean through his chest cavity, tearing the dorsal main heart artery and blowing out the back of his tiger-hide vest in a spray of crushed spine and dark-blood fluid.
Tie Shan’s eyes rolled white into his skull.
The massive Hall Master was lifted six inches off the cobblestones, his body flying backward through the sleet before crashing ten paces away into the drainage ditch.
He hit the mud and didn’t twitch again.
Rain poured into the open crater of his chest, washing black blood across the stones.
Lu Chen lowered his fist. A thin veil of white steam rose from his split leather knuckles, disappearing into the cold night sky.
He turned his gaze toward the thirty students.
“Who carries the stretcher?” Lu Chen asked.