Behind Lu Chen, the double doors of the Judge’s banquet hall hung splintered on their bronze pintles, split down the center by the iron toe of his boot.
Cold night wind rushed through the shattered lattice frames behind him, meeting the dry heat streaming from his broad shoulders in thick ribbons of gray steam.
The air inside the hall tasted of stale vinegar, spilled liquor. The rotting mud of a dried canal bed.
Two dead guards in green coats lay sprawled across an overturned dining table, their ribcages caved inward like broken baskets.
In the far corner, three county clerks cowered behind a lacquer screen, whimpering into their sleeves as broth soaked into their hems.
Lu Chen spared them no glance.
His boots crunched over fine china shards and duck carcasses, rhythmically pacing across the soot-stained wool rug.
At the far end of the hall, raised on a raised dais beneath a cedar board carved with the words Virtue Preserves the State, stood Bailiff Qian.
The assistant district judge had lost his stiff black gauze cap.
His greasy hair clung to his sagging jowls in wet strands. His plump fingers, heavy with mutton-fat jade rings, trembled against the arms of his official chair.
“Step back three paces,” Lu Chen said.
His voice was flat, level, carrying the dull weight of an iron dead-house bell.
Qian’s bloodshot eyes bulged in their sockets, the yellowed whites crisscrossed with burst veins.
“You insolent gutter dog,” Qian snarled. His voice shook between wild debt panic and feral hatred. “You third-class dead-house wretch. Do you know whose turf this is?”
Lu Chen kept walking.
“The morgue is closed,” Lu Chen said. “Your accounts are overdue.”
“Accounts?” Qian shrieked, clutching the stitched front of his dark green silk gown.
“I have forty years of tax registers signed by the Ministry! Who will audit the Seventh Ward storehouses if I die?”
“The country governor will flay every beggar in this county alive to balance the books!”
“You’ll balance nothing,” Lu Chen said.
He shifted his grip on the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
The notched iron spine caught the flickering red light of the hanging animal fat lanterns.
Qian’s breath hitched, turning into a wet, rattling gasp from deep below his lungs.
“You think I fear your butcher’s iron?” Qian hissed, an oily smile twitching across his fat lips. “You think I lived sixty winters in this corpse-ridden valley by trusting the Emperor’s law?”
The court guard seized the collar of his fine silk robes with both fists.
With a savage heave, he tore the stitched silk apart from throat to hem.
The fine green fabric shredded with the dry screech of tearing sailcloth.
The stench that billowed from his torso made the animal fat lamps gutter into sickly yellow sparks.
It was the choking, rotten-egg reek of deep-swamp silt, rotting eel fat, and stale marsh water.
Court guard Qian’s mortal belly had been hollowed out.
Fused directly into his belly wall, rooted into his pelvic bone and stitched to his lower ribs with blackened bronze wire, was the living upper torso of an ancient Swamp Ghoul.
Its waterlogged skin was the color of bruised river clay, mottled with patches of leech-like mold.
Two sunken, lidless yellow eyes rolled wildly in deep bony sockets situated three inches beneath Qian’s navel, glaring with ancient malice.
Its mouth was a wide, spade-shaped level slit spanning Qian’s waist, bristling with three rows of semi-clear needle teeth.
Below Qian’s breastbone, a bulbous throat sac pulsed rhythmically like an engorged toad, swollen with black-green bile.
Thick purple sinews twitched beneath the seam, binding the ghoul’s shoulders directly into Qian’s internal organs.
As Qian breathed, the second mouth wheezed, blowing sour swamp vapor across the dais.
The amber tracking data box flickered once across the edge of Lu Chen’s vision and settled into cold numbers.
Twelve hundred malice units.
The largest pocket of packed rotting energy within twenty leagues of Black Water County.
“Look at it!” Qian screamed, his human mouth foaming while the second mouth clicked its needle teeth.
“The Water Ghost Sect promised me three hundred years! Three hundred years of breath, and all the salt tolls to the capital!”
“You think a child playing with corpses can undo sixty years of careful grafting?”
“The graft is rotten,” Lu Chen said.
His blood heat nudged upward, climbing from forty-two degrees toward forty-five.
The melted rock waste-veins along his collarbone and left forearm flared with dull charcoal heat. It burned off the cold dampness of the hall.
Qian’s flabby throat worked, followed by a violent, sucking burst from his stomach.
The swamp ghoul’s jaws snapped open.
Sploosh!
A thick torrent of black-green rotting black bile erupted from the ghoul’s maw, spraying across five paces directly toward Lu Chen’s face.
Leaping backward would only expose his boots to the splashing pool on the flat stone slabs.
Instead, he dropped his stance and angled his heavy boiled leather dead-house apron forward like a tall body-shield.
The acidic bile slammed full against the cattle hide.
Hssssssss!
Violent white vapor erupted into the air. It carried the eye-watering stench of scorched animal fat and sulfur.
The boiled leather, hardened with burning lime powder and beef grease, began to blister and liquefy almost instantly.
The acid-burning bile ate through the half-inch leather slab in three seconds. It splashed directly onto the slate-gray skin of Lu Chen’s chest.
Intense chemical heat bit into his flesh.
Normal mortal skin would have melted to the bone, muscles sloughing off like boiled porridge.
But Lu Chen’s Molten Tiger Vajra Body responded instantly to the trauma.
The blood circulating beneath his chest bone was already burning at forty-six degrees, its Yang thickness far exceeding mortal body limits.
The acid struck his outer skin. Then, the scorched outer skin sizzled and turned to charcoal, but the dense muscle fibers beneath held firm.
The extreme internal heat of his blood boiled the moisture out of the rotting acid faster than it could corrode his deep tissue.
Epidermal scorch depth: a tiny fraction of an inch. Muscle belly intact. Torque reduction: zero.
Lu Chen stepped through the cloud of hissing vapor.
“Impossible!” Qian shrieked, terror cracking through his arrogant facade. “The corpse acid dissolves bronze!”
The court guard lunged forward with ugly speed.
His mortal legs were clumsy. But the muscular shoulders of the grafted ghoul bent in tandem, providing an explosive surge of drive.
In Qian’s right hand was a heavy bronze judge’s seal, swung with the driving force of a headsman’s hammer aimed straight at Lu Chen’s skull.
From the sides of Qian’s belly, two rubbery arms tipped with four-inch hooked claws raked diagonally toward Lu Chen’s throat.
Lu Chen moved into the strike’s dead zone.
He stepped inside the bronze seal’s sweeping radius. That turned on his left heel while his right shoulder met Qian’s chest with brutal force.
THUD!
The impact rattled Qian’s ribs, but the ghoul’s claws tore through Lu Chen’s shirt. He scraped along his slate-hard ribs like nails dragged across cast iron.
Four jagged white gouges opened across Lu Chen’s chest, weeping dark, overheated blood.
The claws tried to pump rotting ice into his veins, but they met an inferno.
The blood leaking from Lu Chen’s wounds was boiling hot, searing the ghoul’s gray claws with a sharp sizzle of burnt grease.
The ghoul’s lower torso convulsed. It screeched as the Yang heat from Lu Chen’s flesh scorched its nerve endings.
Lu Chen brought his right arm down.
The notched ox-bone cleaver snapped downward in a tight, brutal arc.
CLANG!
The blade smashed directly into the dropping bronze seal.
Sparks rained across the dais in a blinding shower.
The tremendous shock traveled straight up Qian’s arm, shattering the court guard’s wrist joint with a sickening crunch.
The heavy bronze seal dropped from limp fingers, thudding into the floor.
Qian wailed in agony. But the swamp ghoul had already taken control of his lower body.
The ghoul’s muscular arms coiled around Lu Chen’s waist like wet pythons, its spade-like jaws snapping repeatedly at his ribs.
The copper wires stitching the ghoul to Qian’s pelvis stretched taut, tearing into Qian’s living flesh and drenching the court guard’s thighs in dark blood.
“Kill him!” Qian babbled, his mortal sanity cracking under the pain.
“Graft his arms onto my back! Eat his marrow!”
Lu Chen released the cleaver.
The twelve-pound weapon plunged into the floorboards, sinking three inches into the oak.
At this range, a rigid weapon lacked clockwork leverage.
Against an unnatural graft with two nerve centers and four limbs, only bare hands could deliver maximum crushing force.
Lu Chen planted his boots into the dais, locking his knees and dropping his balance point.
The swamp ghoul’s throat sac swelled once more, darkening to purple as a fresh reserve of rotting black bile surged upward.
It was aiming point-blank at Lu Chen’s throat, barely five inches away.
Lu Chen didn’t blink.
He drove both hands straight into the rising vapor.
His left hand shot forward and clamped like an iron vise around the swamp ghoul’s upper jaw.
His fingers sank deep behind the creature’s yellow eye sockets. He locked onto the dense joint padding of its skull.
The acid-burning bile spilled over his knuckles, burning his skin down to the tendon. But his grip remained total.
With his right hand, Lu Chen grasped the ghoul’s lower jaw from underneath, his thumb wedged beneath its chin.
The creature’s needle teeth sank into the meat of his forearms, drawing crimson ribbons. But Lu Chen’s eyes remained fully cold.
Steam blasted from the pores of his neck, clouding the space between their faces.
He bent his knees.
He engaged his lower-back muscles, his blood heat surging toward fifty-five degrees. His melted rock waste-veins burned with black glass fury.
He twisted his hips to initiate torque, preparing to tear the grafted horror out of Bailiff Qian’s living belly.