Needle teeth ground against the forearm bone of Lu Chen’s left forearm. It screeched like rusted shears on an anvil.
Black blood, cold and thick, sticky as ditch water, welled up where the swamp ghoul bit through his skin.
Lu Chen didn’t pull back.
Pulling back would strip flesh from the bone. Pushing forward locked the joint.
He drove his fingers half an inch deeper behind the ghoul’s yellow eye sockets, finding the slick ridges of its skull bone.
His right hand clamped under its lower jaw, thumbs pressing hard into the soft joint padding of its throat sac.
“Let go!” Qian shrieked, his voice cracking into frantic, blood-spitting sobs.
“It’s tearing my liver! You’re ripping my guts out!”
“Be quiet,” Lu Chen said.
His core fire dropped all heat limiters.
Inside his dantian, the ember-bright crucible flared into a roaring blast.
His blood heat surged from forty-six degrees to fifty-two, then spiked wildly toward sixty.
Under his slate-gray skin, the charcoal melted rock waste-veins running along his left collarbone and forearm flared dull crimson, like iron rods pulled from a blacksmith’s forge.
Intense heat radiated from his palms directly into the swamp ghoul’s skull.
The creature’s waterlogged flesh sizzled, blistering instantly as the moisture boiled out of its gray fat.
The ghoul thrashed in total agony.
Its rubbery arms flailed wildly, talons tearing gouges in the oak floorboards and gouging deep, bloody furrows into Qian’s own thighs.
Lu Chen planted his right boot firmly against Qian’s pubic bone.
With clockwork leverage and pure turning force, he locked his lower-back spine, engaged his glutes. Then he wrenched his shoulders backward with eighteen hundred pounds of sheer explosive force.
Snap. Ping. Snap.
The blackened bronze wires stitching the ghoul’s ribs into Qian’s belly wall snapped one by one, singing through the air like cut harp strings.
Then came the flesh.
Rotten purple sinews, rotting fat, and living human peritoneum tore apart with the sickening sound of wet sailcloth ripping in a gale.
A geyser of black bile and scarlet bright red blood erupted across the dais, drenching the gold-trimmed judge plaque above them.
Court guard Qian’s mortal screams hit a pitch that shattered the leftover oiled paper in the banquet hall windows.
The swamp ghoul shrieked all at once. A piercing, psychic wail of dying malice that rattled the fine china bowls on the floor.
With a final, sickening tear of connective tissue, the entire upper torso of the swamp ghoul came free in Lu Chen’s hands.
Lu Chen staggered back two steps, his boots leaving charred, bloody prints on the wool rug.
The cut ghoul was not dead.
Even separated from Qian’s pelvis, its yellow eyes rolled wildly, its needle-filled maw snapping at the empty air while its rubbery claws tried to hook around Lu Chen’s neck.
He pivoted on his left foot without pause. It slammed the cut torso down against the solid mountain stone of the dais with the full driving weight of his body.
CRACK!
The granite cracked beneath the impact.
Before the creature could flail again, Lu Chen lifted his right boot, iron-shod and heavy as a headsman’s mallet. Then it drove his heel straight into the center of the ghoul’s skull.
SPLAT.
The creature’s head caved inward like a rotten gourd.
Black-green rotting fluid, shattered teeth, and gray pulp sprayed across the floor, hissing softly against the stone.
The rubbery arms gave one final, pathetic twitch, then went fully limp.
The amber light flashed wildly across Lu Chen’s eyes.
Twelve hundred units of pure, pure malice flooded his spirit veins, cold and heavy as liquid silver.
The Asura Crucible in his chest roared to eat it. That turned the icy curse into an inferno of Yang energy.
On the floor three paces away, Bailiff Qian was crawling.
The lower half of his body was a red, hollowed ruin, his entrails trailing across the blood-slick carpet like discarded rope.
Yet the corrupted life-force of sixty years of demonic medicine still kept his mortal lungs pumping.
He clawed his way toward the carved legs of his official desk. That left a broad smear of dark gore behind him.
“Mercy,” Qian wheezed, his mouth bubbling with pink foam. “Master Lu, hear me.”
Lu Chen walked over, his steps slow, deliberate, and silent.
“The treasury,” Qian gasped, his shaking fingers scrabbling against the floorboards. “Behind the old family shrine.”
“Four thousand coins of royal bullion and three jade pendants. Take it all, take the books.”
Lu Chen stopped beside Qian’s head.
He looked down at the dying judge with cold, unblinking calm distance.
“The books are burned,” Lu Chen said.
“I can write a full pardon,” Qian coughed, his eyes rolling back in terror as he looked up into Lu Chen’s face.
“The country governor knows my hand. If I die, the Black Banner guard post will hang every soul in the Seventh Ward.”
“They will find only ash,” Lu Chen said.
He lifted his right foot and brought his heel down with tuned, crushing finality.
CRACK.
Qian’s skull collapsed against the granite.
The court guard’s fingers twitched once, the mutton-fat jade rings scraping the stone, then dropped still forever.
He stepped past the corpse.
Inside his chest, the breakthrough blew up.
Twelve hundred units of converted malice surged through his main spirit veins like molten copper poured into a dry mold.
His muscles tightened wildly, each fiber compressing and densifying until his torso felt as dense as solid oak.
The heat didn’t stop at his flesh.
It pushed deeper, sinking through the outer bone layer directly into the marrow of his skeleton.
A dull, painful ache spread through his collarbone, ribs, and femurs as the heat baked the calcium, hardening the bone lattice to resist blunt crushing impact.
His flesh tempering had reached its total pinnacle: Half-Step Bone Forging.
He was half a step away from entering the true martial realm of Bone Forging, where human bone could deflect temple steel without breaking.
Then came the living backlash.
The Melted rock-Vein syndrome struck with the force of an avalanche.
His blood heat spiked to sixty-eight degrees. It was hot enough to cook mortal brain tissue and cause massive organ failure.
His vision went dark at the edges, tunneling into black fog.
A violent, freezing convulsion seized his chest muscle, choking the air from his throat as his body desperately tried to cool itself without enough fuel.
Caloric reserve: zero.
Burning failure coming soon.
Lu Chen dropped to one knee, the stone floor burning under his palms.
Steam hissed wildly from every pore on his arms and neck, wrapping him in a dense white cloud.
His heart fluttered like a trapped bird, skipping beats as the scorched vessels in his chest hardened into brittle melted rock waste.
He didn’t panic.
Panic was a mortal indulgence that led directly to the grave.
With numb, blistered fingers, Lu Chen tore open the small oilcloth pouch tied to his belt.
He pulled out a hard, fist-sized cake of dried sheep fat, heavily salted and preserved for emergency fuel. He shoved the cold, greasy animal fat into his mouth, chewing with clockwork fury and choking down the waxy, foul-tasting fat without water.
The calorie-dense animal fat hit his stomach like dry timber thrown onto dying coals.
His stomach tract, sped up by the fire’s extreme heat, melted and absorbed the fat within seconds.
A wave of dense, nourishing energy rushed into his bloodstream, lubricating his scorched spirit veins and arresting the cellular collapse.
His blood heat dropped steadily back to forty-two degrees as the tremors stopped. His heartbeat slowed, falling into a deep, rhythmic drumbeat that echoed through his hardened ribs.
Lu Chen rose to his feet. He pulled his notched ox-bone cleaver from the floorboards. He wiped the black ghoul bile from the iron spine with a scrap of Qian’s torn silk robe.
Behind the dais, the overturned animal fat lanterns had already done their work.
Flames raced up the stitched silk hangings. It sent oily smoke rolling across cedar ceiling beams that groaned under total collapse.
The banquet hall was turning into an inferno.
Above him, the roof rafters cracked with the sound of snapping artillery, threatening to bring thousands of pounds of burning tile down on his head.
Lu Chen locked the cleaver into his belt loop and lunged for the courtyard gates before the hall collapsed.