The dead don’t bleed for long in freezing rain.
Within three breaths, the dark crater in Master Tie Shan’s chest stopped bubbling. The cold sleet washed away the froth. It showed the jagged ends of four fractured ribs jutting through his shredded tiger-hide vest.
Thirty students stood rooted in the mud, their torches trembling against the gray gloom of Seventh Ward.
Not a single man breathed.
In Black Water County, Master Tie Shan was an unmoving mountain of muscle and lead. He had broken iron anvils with his bare palms. He had thrown drunken constables into the canal by their throats.
Now, he lay folded backward in a drainage ditch like a discarded sack of wet grain.
Lu Chen wiped a smear of atomized blood from his right knuckles with the hem of his animal fat apron.
His breath plumed into the cold air in thick, rhythmic jets. The heat in his chest settled from seventy degrees back to fifty-two degrees, the charcoal melted rock waste-veins along his forearm cooling into black glass bands.
He raised his eyes toward the thirty students.
“Who carries the stretcher?” Lu Chen repeated.
His voice was quiet, lacking anger, dramatic malice, or triumphant boast. It sounded like an undertaker asking for the weight of a pine coffin.
The students flinched as one body.
In the second row, a senior apprentice with shaved temples and brass knuckles gripped his iron heavy club until his fingers turned purple. His name was Geng San, Tie Shan’s foremost debt collector.
“Sorcery...” Geng San’s voice cracked, rising into a shrill shriek. “He used a ghost-needle! He used demonic corpse-poison!”
Two other senior students stepped forward, their faces twisted between animal terror and desperate debt.
“If the Hall Master is dead and we run, Bailiff Qian will skin our families!” Geng San screamed, raising his iron heavy club. “He’s exhausted his Qi! Kill him while he cools down!”
Three men rushed forward across the muddy cobblestones.
Geng San swung his iron heavy club in a level cleaving arc aimed at Lu Chen’s skull. The second student slashed low with an iron-toothed hooked pruning blade. The third thrust a pig-sticker dagger toward his throat.
Lu Chen didn’t blink.
He didn’t draw his notched ox-bone cleaver. Drawing steel against brittle mortal bone was an unnecessary waste of blade upkeep.
He stepped inside the heavy club’s arc.
CLACK!
The iron heavy club slammed across Lu Chen’s left forearm.
The heavy iron bar bent into a sharp, sixty-degree angle against his hardened slate skin. The shaking traveled straight back up the shaft, shattering Geng San’s thumb joints with a sickening snap.
Before Geng San could register the agony, Lu Chen’s left palm drove upward into the man’s elbow joint.
CRACK!
The senior student’s arm snapped backward like dry firewood. White humeral bone pierced the sleeve in a spray of blood.
Lu Chen shifted his weight two inches to the right.
The hooked pruning blade missed his hip by half a finger. Lu Chen’s right boot snapped down, planting two hundred pounds of Vajra mass directly onto the second student’s kneecap.
CRUNCH!
The kneecap turned into powder beneath his heel. The man collapsed face-first into the freezing slush, his scream choked off by a mouthful of muddy gravel.
The third student—the one with the pig-sticker dagger—froze three inches from Lu Chen’s chest.
He stared at Lu Chen’s slate-colored neck, then at his two mangled peers writhing in the mud, then at the bent iron heavy club on the ground.
Lu Chen looked into the student’s eyes.
“Drop it,” Lu Chen said.
The dagger slipped from numb fingers, splashing harmlessly into the puddle.
“Run,” Lu Chen added.
The student didn’t need to be told twice. He turned on his heel, slipped once in the mire, scrambled up on all fours. Then he bolted down the alley howling like a scalded dog.
Behind him, the leftover twenty-seven students broke into total rout.
Torches were hurled into the gutter, sizzling out in the dark. Bladed knuckles, iron clubs, and leather cudgels clattered across the cobblestones as thirty men scattered in wild panic toward the northern and southern gates.
The Iron Fist School had ceased to exist in Black Water County in less than forty breaths.
Silence returned to the alley. It was broken only by the hiss of rain on cold stone and Old Meng’s wheezing gasps.
Lu Chen walked over to Master Tie Shan’s corpse.
He knelt in the mud, his heavy animal fat apron shielding his knees from the slurry. His fingers probed the mangled wreckage of Tie Shan’s chest cavity with clean, steady care.
Beneath the crushed breastbone. There, the heart-sac should have been cold and still, a faint, rhythmic throb continued to beat.
It wasn’t a human heart.
Lu Chen tore away the wet leftovers of the tiger-hide vest.
Embedded in the upper junction of Tie Shan’s right collar bone was an oddity. A blackened bronze amulet the size of a pigeon’s egg, carved in the shape of a coiled, many-legged centipede. Tiny brass needles extended from its underbelly, burrowed deep into the dead man’s subclavian artery, sipping leftover warmth.
A faint amber glow lit up Lu Chen’s eye.
Harvest, Lu Chen thought.
The familiar sensation of an iron damper swinging open echoed in his marrow.
The black slime coating the bronze centipede boiled away into greasy indigo smoke, sucked directly into Lu Chen’s left palm. The fire in his belly flared with a pleasant, dry heat. It burned away the slight chill of the rain.
Lu Chen pinched the bronze centipede between his thumb and forefinger.
With a slow squeeze, the brittle metal crumbled into harmless green dust that washed away in the drainage ditch.
He searched the dead man’s leather belt.
A heavy cowhide purse yielded forty-two coins of stamped county tax silver, two sealed fine china phials of Blood-Coagulating Powder. A thick sheet of folded parchment wrapped in oiled pigskin.
Lu Chen unfolded the parchment with bloodstained fingers.
It was a black ledger bearing the official vermilion wax seal of the Black Water County Yamen. On it were detailed thirty-six separate bribes paid by Master Tie Shan to Assistant Judge Bailiff Qian, recording illegal tolls pulled out from butcher stalls, rice merchants, and the Seventh Ward night watch fund.
At the bottom was Qian’s personal signed name: Approved for harvest.
“Paperwork,” Lu Chen murmured, tucking the ledger into the waterproof lining of his apron. “Debt.”
“You... You killed him,” a gravelly voice rasped from the shadows.
Lu Chen looked up.
Doctor Bai stood on the dead-house threshold. The old physician held a sputtering animal fat candle in one nicotine-stained hand and his smoking bitterleaf pipe in the other. Greasy glasses sat crooked on his hawk-like nose.
Bai stared at Tie Shan’s caved-in chest, then at the bent iron heavy club lying five feet away.
“I’ve autopsied three hundred bodies in this county,” Bai said. He exhaled a pungent cloud of blue smoke into the sleet. “I’ve seen men trampled by water buffalo. I’ve seen men crushed by quarry boulders. I’ve never seen a human fist turn a chest bone into porridge.”
“He had brittle bones,” Lu Chen said, standing up from the ditch.
Doctor Bai let out a dry, hacking laugh that tasted of old tobacco. “Brittle bones? Tie Shan ate tiger marrow and iron sand for thirty years! You’re lucky his ghost doesn’t crawl out of his throat right now.”
“His seal is crushed,” Lu Chen said. “He won’t crawl.”
Doctor Bai’s gaze sharpened, lingering on the charcoal melted rock waste-veins visible on Lu Chen’s forearm. The physician didn’t ask further. In Black Water County, curious men ended up on stone slabs before their teeth fell out.
“Old Meng is leaking,” Bai said, nodding toward the wall. “If we leave him in this slush another ten minutes, his lung lining fills with fluid and he chokes on his own soup.”
Lu Chen walked over to Old Meng.
The old watchman’s eyes fluttered open beneath his gray brow. His good eye was cloudy with pain, but his jaw remained locked in stubborn grit.
“Boy...” Meng croaked, his voice like gravel grinding on bronze. “Tie Shan... Is he...”
“Dead,” Lu Chen said.
“Good,” Meng wheezed, dark blood bubbling on his split lip. “Owed me... Three pots of sulfur wine...”
Lu Chen knelt and slid his hands under Old Meng’s back and knees.
With easy high-pressure power, he lifted the old watchman into his arms. The heat streaming from Lu Chen’s chest seeped through Meng’s soaked coat, halting the old man’s violent shivers.
“Inside,” Doctor Bai said, turning back into the dead-house. “Bring the saw, the needle roll, and the bitter pine-resin jar. Tonight we sew meat.”
Lu Chen carried Old Meng across the threshold. The heavy oak doors swung shut, barring the freezing rain outside.
Across Black Water County, the rain carried panic faster than the wind.
Three streets away, Geng San stumbled through the gates of the County Yamen, his shattered arm dangling like a broken branch, shrieking into the night that the dead-house boy had turned into an iron demon.