Red roof tiles thundered down as the Judge’s yamen collapsed inward with a heavy, roaring crash.
A pillar of orange sparks erupted into the pre-dawn sky. It drifted across the gray tiled roofs of Black Water County like a swarm of burning locusts.
Lu Chen stepped out through the scorched cedar gates into the courtyard.
The freezing mountain draft swept over his bare chest, yet the sub-zero chill felt mild against his skin.
His blood heat was idling at forty-one degrees, his scorched spirit veins humming with the lingering shaking of twelve hundred units of burned up malice.
In the center of the courtyard, beside a dry stone well, Lu Chen stopped.
The violent fight-or-flight rush of combat was fading, replaced by the heavy nerve recoil of the breakthrough.
In the corners of his vision, pale afterimages flickered across the stone walls—ugly, shadow-like limbs and the weeping yellow eyes of the swamp ghoul.
Faint, hallucinatory whispers scraped at the back of his mind, murmuring fragmented tax codes and ancient swamp curses.
The Uncanny never died cleanly.
Its lingering psychic residue always clung to the living flesh that burned up it.
Lu Chen reached into his left sleeve and drew out a four-inch iron bone awl.
The unpolished iron was cold, pitted with rust and oil.
He placed the square point against the thick callous of his left palm.
Without a flicker of pause, Lu Chen drove the awl downward, piercing half an inch into the meat of his hand.
Dark crimson blood, hot as freshly drawn tea, welled up around the iron shank.
A sharp, electric spike of gut-deep pain shot straight up his forearm nerve, cutting through the demonic whispers like an axe through rotten twine.
The phantom shadows shattered and vanished into the cold morning air.
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked.”
The reality seam held firm.
He pulled the iron awl from his palm, wiped the blood against his trousers. Then he slid the tool back into his sleeve.
He lowered the wooden bucket into the well, drawing up half a pail of icy water.
Lu Chen splashed the freezing water over his chest and shoulders.
The water hissed on contact with his skin, billowing into white vapor as it rinsed away the acid-burning traces of rotting black bile.
The boiled leather apron was fully ruined, melted into a stiff crust of charred hide.
He unbuckled the straps and let the destroyed armor drop into the dirt.
Across his ribs, four jagged claw gouges were already clotting into thick, dark scabs, sealed shut by the extreme heat of his blood.
He reached into his salt pouch, took a handful of coarse gray crystals. Then he rubbed them directly into the open wounds to sterilize the rotting rot.
The salt burned like fire, but Lu Chen’s pulse didn’t quicken by a single beat.
The tracking data display faded into the gray light of dawn.
Peak Flesh Tempering.
Beneath his slate-gray muscle wall, his skeletal frame felt dense and unbending. It hummed with a heavy, leaden deep ring.
His bones had absorbed the fire’s heat, hardening their outer lattice into something far harder than mortal marrow.
He was half a step away from true Bone Forging.
Behind him, distant bronze alarm gongs began to clang from the eastern watchtowers.
The sound was wild, uneven, and panicked.
The clerks and surviving guards had finally spread word that the assistant district judge had been slaughtered and the county registers reduced to cinder.
Lu Chen picked up his notched ox-bone cleaver from the stones.
He retrieved his canvas travel sack from the yamen gatehouse, slung it over his shoulder. Then he walked down the hill toward the Seventh Ward.
The narrow alleys of Black Water County were dead silent despite the distant gongs.
Every wooden shutter was barred. Every door was bolted from within.
Common folk in this valley knew better than to poke their heads out when smoke rose from official residences.
In the border counties of the Great Yong Dynasty, a burning yamen meant either bandits, martial sects, or horrors.
None of the three offered mercy to bystanders.
Lu Chen reached the Seventh District Mortuary. Just then, the first gray light pierced the mountain fog.
Old Meng sat on the stone bench outside the dead-house gate, leaning both hands on his iron-banded hickory heavy club.
His boiled leather eyepatch was tied tight, his wrinkled face set like weathered granite under the brim of his straw hat.
Beside him stood Doctor Bai, leaning against the doorframe in his blood-spotted linen apron.
The physician was rolling a pinch of dried bitterleaf into a scrap of paper with tobacco-stained fingers.
Neither man looked surprised.
Old Meng lifted his good eye, watching Lu Chen approach through the swirling mist.
“The hill is burning,” Old Meng said.
“Qian is dead,” Lu Chen said.
Old Meng exhaled a long breath that smelled of sulfur liquor.
“Good,” Old Meng said.
Doctor Bai struck an iron fire-striker, lighting the bitterleaf roll and taking a deep drag.
He blew a thin stream of blue smoke into the chilly morning air, his greasy glasses catching the gray dawn light.
“Corpse acid took your apron,” Doctor Bai observed, his cold and exact gaze raking over Lu Chen’s scorched ribs. “Spleen still ticking?”
“Ticking,” Lu Chen replied.
Doctor Bai reached into his deep sleeve. Then he pulled out a heavy clay pot crock sealed with red wax.
Beside it, he set down three grease-stained paper parcels tied with hemp string.
“Bitter pine-resin lard,” Doctor Bai said, gesturing with his smoldering cigarette. “Rub it on the burns twice a day so the dead skin sloughs without festering.”
“And the packages?” Lu Chen asked.
“Salted pig marrow and sheep fat,” Doctor Bai said. “Four pounds of pure fat.”
“Your internal plumbing runs hotter than a blacksmith’s chimney pipe. If you don’t feed the fire, your own blood will calcify your heart before you reach the pass.”
Lu Chen picked up the crock and the packages, stowing them inside his canvas sack.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Lu Chen said.
“Don’t thank me,” Doctor Bai grunted, coughing into his fist. “I don’t fancy studying a corpse whose ribs have melted together. It ruins my saw blades.”
Old Meng stood up slowly, his hickory heavy club thudding against the flat stone slabs with a dull, heavy thump.
He limped two paces forward. His gaze drifted toward the rising column of black smoke above the judge’s hill.
“Country cavalry will be here by tomorrow evening,” Old Meng said. “Black Banner riders.”
“They don’t investigate or audit. They string up twenty men for every dead official to keep the peasants compliant.”
“I’m leaving,” Lu Chen said.
“Take the western ridge,” Old Meng said.
“The Old Crow Pass is choked with ghost-fog, but normal soldiers won’t dare ride through it. A man with hot blood can make it across if he doesn’t stop to sleep.”
Old Meng unhooked a battered iron gourd from his hip and held it out.
“Drink,” the old watchman said.
Lu Chen took the gourd, pulled the wooden stopper, and swallowed a mouthful of the harsh sulfur liquor.
The liquid burned like liquid fire down his throat, cutting the foul taste of ghoul acid from his tongue.
He handed the gourd back.
“Stay alive, Meng,” Lu Chen said.
“Old bones don’t burn easily,” Old Meng said. “Go.”
Lu Chen nodded once.
He adjusted the strap of his canvas sack, settled the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver against his hip. Then he turned toward the western gate.
He didn’t look back.
Behind him, Black Water County shrank into a smudge of gray fog and drifting ash.
The road wound steeply upward into the jagged limestone cliffs of the Black Mountain Range.
The morning air grew colder with every hundred paces, frost crusting the pine needles along the narrow goat track.
Yet inside Lu Chen’s chest, the Asura Crucible hummed with steady, rhythmic heat at forty-one degrees.
His lead-hardened bones absorbed each step with easy, grounded balance, iron tendons flexing beneath slate-gray skin.
Ahead of him lay three hundred leagues of untamed mountain wilderness, lawless guard post towns, and the ancient Uncanny territories barring the road to Gu Ning Country City.
The Great Yong Dynasty was rotting from its marrow out. Corrupt officials, grafted demonic sects, and specters that feasted on mortal blood ruled the dark.
Behind him, the distant hooves of Black Banner outriders would soon drum against the valley floor. Ahead, the freezing gales of Old Crow Mountain gathered in the dark, ready to freeze any blood that slowed to sleep.
Lu Chen gripped the handle of his cleaver. It felt the heavy iron vibrate against his palm.
Flesh was mortal, but horrors were eternal. He leaned into the steep ascent, determined to forge his bones before the winter and the cavalry caught him.