With the sharp crack of green bamboo snapping under an ox cart, the oak crossbar fractured.
Iron nails screeched as three-inch timber tore free from the doorframe. Outside the Seventh Ward Watch Station, twenty pairs of blackened feet scraped against wet cobblestones, with the wet, rhythmic rattle of dead windpipes gasping for air that didn’t exist.
Lu Chen planted his heels into the grit of the entryway floorboards. He didn’t step back.
Behind him, Old Meng leaned his weight against the battered weapons rack. The old watchman’s face was chalky under the oil lantern’s amber glow, three cracked ribs bound tight with boiled hemp cloth.
“They’re through the outer skin, lad,” Old Meng rasped, his voice whistling through clenched yellow teeth. He gripped his iron-banded heavy club with two trembling hands. “Don’t let ’em bottleneck you in the hallway.”
“Sit down,” Lu Chen said. “Save your breath.”
Across the common room, Doctor Bai crouched behind an overturned dead-house desk. The coroner’s stained glasses sat crooked on his nose, a roll of catgut and three bone-saws laid out across a canvas tarp. A smoldering clay pipe of dried bitterleaf was clamped between his back teeth. It sent bitter gray curls toward the ceiling beams.
“Four barrels of burning lime powder by the pantry,” Bai muttered without looking up. “Two earthen crocks of rock salt. If their bile touches your skin, wash it with vinegar before sunrise or your flesh will liquefy like rotten suet.”
Lu Chen lifted the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver with his right hand. It rolled his shoulder to settle the weight along his upper back muscle.
The heavy iron spine of the blade was cold. His own skin was not. Beneath the heavy animal fat-stained apron, the dark charcoal veins coiled around his left arm pulsed with a dull, underground warmth.
Boom.
The oak door gave way entirely. A shower of splintered wood and rusted iron brackets burst into the front hall.
Through the breach lunged the first corpse-graft.
It had been an unsafe highwayman once, judging by the brand burned into its cheekbone. Now its chest had been slit from collarbone to groin and resewn with coarse hemp cord, grafting the swollen, gray muscular shoulders of a river ghoul onto the mortal frame. Three-inch rusted iron spikes protruded from its knuckles, dripping foul brown ichor.
The monster lunged forward with inhuman gaining speed, dead weight propelled by unnatural sinew, claws hooking toward Lu Chen’s windpipe.
Lu Chen didn’t block. Blocking dead weight wasted leverage.
He stepped half a pace forward, dipping his left shoulder inside the ghoul’s reach. His left palm, hardened into dark slate by the Ox-Demon Skin, drove upward into the creature’s chest bone.
Crack.
The impact sounded like a stone sledgehammer striking wet clay. The ghoul’s resewn chest caved inward three inches.
At the same instant, Lu Chen brought the notched cleaver down in a vicious upright chop. The heavy iron edge caught the creature where its grafted neck met its shoulder. Bone parted with a dull crunch. Black, clotted grease sprayed across the wall, sizzling against the lime wash.
The monster collapsed into a twitching heap at his feet.
Three more shoved over its carcass right away. Behind them in the alleyway, the leftover sixteen pressed forward in a frenzied mass, their jaws unhinged, milky clouded eye eyes fixed on the warmth streaming from the watch station.
Lu Chen’s blood sped up.
Inside his chest, the Molten Tiger Vajra Body flared to life. His blood heat spiked past fifty degrees. Thin ribbons of scalding steam hissed from the pores along his neck, burning through the damp night air.
A second ghoul reached for his throat with jagged bone talons. Lu Chen caught the wrist with his bare left hand.
Sizzle.
The heat streaming from his palm scorched the dead flesh on contact. The corpse’s gray skin blistered and charred, greasy black smoke curling between Lu Chen’s fingers.
With a brutal twist of his hips, Lu Chen snapped the creature’s radius and forearm bone, pivoted. Then he drove the butt of the cleaver into its eye socket. Gray brain matter and stale fluid burst across the flat stone slabs.
“Lime!” Lu Chen called out, his voice flat and controlled.
Behind him, Doctor Bai scooped an iron shovel full of dry burning lime powder from the open barrel and hurled it over Lu Chen’s shoulder into the doorway.
The white powder dusted the advancing corpses like flour. Where it met the dripping black ichor and weeping sores of their grafted limbs, an intense chemical reaction ignited. The lime began to boil, smoking furiously, dissolving the rotten connective tissues in seconds.
The ghouls hissed—a dry, rasping sound like locust wings rubbing together—their dead limbs trembling as the skin-burning heat ate through their joints.
Lu Chen took the threshold.
His cleaver moved with clean, steady care. Every chop followed the natural grain of muscle and bone—severing knees at the joint, cleaving spines at the lower-back notch, smashing skulls with the iron spine.
Nine ghouls fell in sixty seconds. Their cut parts piled high under the rain-drenched top door beam.
Then the backlash struck.
To sustain the Molten Tiger Vajra Body, the crucible was consuming his living fuel reserves at a total speed. The heat burn was staggering.
Lu Chen felt a cold, hollow pang strike his stomach like an iron spike.
His vision doubled. The dull charcoal melted rock waste-veins along his left arm suddenly locked tight, hardening into rigid, frozen cords. The scalding steam billowing from his collar sputtered and died.
A wave of violent freezing shivering rippled through his chest muscle.
A surviving corpse-graft—its jaw split into four needle-lined segments—rammed into Lu Chen’s chest.
Without that heat backing his slate skin, the impact drove Lu Chen back two steps. His boots skidded across the slick boards. The ghoul’s rotten claws raked across his oilcloth apron. That left four shallow white furrows across his chest muscles.
“Lu Chen!” Old Meng shouted from the bench. “Your face is blue!”
“Pantry!” Doctor Bai barked from behind the counter, kicking a clay pot crock across the floorboards. “The winter lard! Catch!”
The heavy clay jar skidded across the slick boards, bumping against Lu Chen’s left boot.
Eyes still on the doorway, Lu Chen swung his cleaver in a wide level arc with his right arm, splitting the jaw-split ghoul across its ribs and hurling it back into the alleyway.
He used the half-second lull. He dropped to one knee, scooped up the heavy crock with his left hand. Then he struck the wax-sealed wooden stopper against the doorframe.
The seal shattered.
Inside lay five pounds of boiled beef animal fat, rendered with coarse salt. Thick, pale, and greasy as axle fat.
Lu Chen tipped the crock back.
He swallowed the congealed animal fat in massive gulps.
Cold fat coated his throat, sliding into his empty, burning stomach like solid fuel onto white coals. Half the crock vanished in five heartbeats.
The reaction was immediate.
The dense fats hit his gastric fire, and his stomach erupted like a lime kiln fed sulfur. Heat tore through his central spirit veins. The brittle melted rock waste-veins along his forearm flushed red-orange beneath slate skin. Shivers vanished instantly.
Fwooosh.
A cloud of white, scalding steam erupted from the neck of his apron, billowing into the entryway with the hiss of a cooling forge. His blood heat rocketed back past fifty-five degrees.
The two leftover corpse-grafts charged over the mound of their fallen brethren, lunging with bared fangs.
Lu Chen rose from his crouch. His eyes were cold and steady.
“Too slow,” he muttered.
He drove his left fist straight through the chest of the first ghoul. The heat streaming from his knuckles charred the flesh instantly, his hand piercing bone like a red-hot poker through winter pork. With a savage jerk, he ripped the creature’s spine apart from the inside.
He pivoted on his right heel, catching the final ghoul by the throat with his right hand.
The creature thrashed, clawing feebly at his forearm, but Lu Chen’s grip was an iron vise. He slammed the monster face-first into the stone threshold, then brought the twelve-pound cleaver down with both hands.
Thud.
The skull split into two clean halves.
The alleyway went dead silent.
Outside, the cold rain drizzled onto the piles of smoking, twitching limbs. Twenty corpse-grafts lay slaughtered across the doorway and the courtyard of the Seventh Ward.
In the darkness, the black, oily mist rising from the dead bodies didn’t scatter into the wind. It coiled inward, drawn toward the heat streaming from Lu Chen’s palms like iron filings to a lodestone.
The Asura Crucible in his chest purred, absorbing every drop of the purified malice.
Lu Chen reached into his left sleeve, withdrew the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl. Then he drove it half an inch into the thick callous of his left palm.
Dark crimson blood welled up around the cold iron point. The sharp pain cut through the combat haze.
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked,” he whispered under his breath.
He pulled the awl free, wiped the blood against his trousers, and turned back to the room.
Old Meng stared at him from the bench, his jaw slack, the dented gong resting forgotten beside his boots. Doctor Bai slowly lowered his bone-saw, taking a long drag from his clay pipe.
“Twenty county ghouls,” Doctor Bai said softly, smoke leaking from his nostrils. “Torn apart like boiled chicken. If the Judge sees this, he won’t send constables next time. He’ll send the guard post’s corpse-fire.”
“He won’t,” Lu Chen said, picking up a rag and wiping the beef animal fat from his mouth.
“Why not?” Old Meng wheezed, clutching his cracked ribs.
Lu Chen wiped the notched spine of his cleaver, checked the edge. Then it tucked a pouch of coarse rock salt into his belt.
“Because,” Lu Chen said, turning his face toward the dark, mist-choked streets of the county center, “I’m going to his manor now.”