A gale of frozen needles whipped across the jagged limestone ridge. It screamed through the black fissures of Old Crow Mountain.
Lu Chen drove his straw-wrapped heel into the loose shale.
The frost-hardened scree cracked under four hundred pounds of tightly packed downward pressure, biting deep into the bedrock to anchor his stride.
Three thousand paces below, Black Water County was nothing more than a faint smudge of greasy gray smoke trapped at the bottom of the valley.
The judge’s burning yamen had likely collapsed by now, burying Qian’s headless corpse beneath charred cedar rafters and official tax ledgers.
Lu Chen didn’t look down.
Looking back was an indulgence reserved for men with warm beds and royal pardons.
The mountain track ahead rose at a brutal forty-degree incline, hugging the sheer face of the western cliff like a frayed rope.
Here, above the snowline, the air tasted of crushed slate, wet pine needles. The iron bite of an encroaching northern blizzard.
Yet beneath his coarse linen shirt, Lu Chen’s chest was streaming steady, choking heat.
His internal fire was idling at forty-eight degrees.
Every breath of freezing alpine air drew sub-zero frost into his lungs, only for it to be burned up in his lung tubes and exhaled through his nostrils as thick plumes of white steam.
Across the corded muscle of his forearms and the sides of his throat, dark charcoal lines pulsed beneath the skin.
They were melted rock waste-veins. Backup spirit veins permanently scorched and hardened into glassy black glass channels during the crucible breakthroughs.
In the dim mountain light, the raised black lines wrapped around his sinews like the stripes of a prowling tiger.
They didn’t ache now, but they hummed with a heavy, leaden shaking that set his teeth on edge.
The amber tracking data box flickered across his eye nerve, then dissolved against the gray mountain mist.
His core was stable, but the cost was steep.
At forty-eight degrees, his body was an open crucible burning through fuel at three times the rate of an ordinary mortal martial artist.
A hollow, gnawing cramp twisted in the pit of his stomach.
His metabolism was demanding fats.
If his heat intake dropped in this sub-zero cold, the Molten Tiger Vajra art would begin digesting his own liver and fat under the skin to keep his core stoked.
Lu Chen paused beneath the shelter of a weeping rock overhang.
A trickle of mountain spring water had frozen into an icicle as thick as a man’s thigh, suspended above a shallow stone basin.
He didn’t waste time looking for firewood.
Fire drew eyes, and on Old Crow Mountain, human eyes were the least dangerous things hiding in the pines.
He raised his right boot and brought his heel down on the frozen basin.
Crack.
The four-inch sheet of ice shattered into clean sharp-angled wedges without a sound.
Lu Chen dropped his canvas pack onto a dry boulder and reached inside.
Doctor Bai’s care package was wrapped in three layers of coarse brown paper. It was tied with hemp twine and grease-soaked wax cloth.
He unwrapped the first parcel. He showed a brick of cold sheep fat and salted marrow, dense as beeswax and yellowed with age.
The fat smelled strong and feral, spiced with coarse rock salt and dried mountain peppers.
Lu Chen broke off a four-ounce chunk of the hard animal fat and shoved it into his mouth.
He chewed slowly, grinding the stiff, salted fat between his back teeth.
The moment the animal fat touched his tongue, his blood responded.
Salivary enzymes broke the fat down. His throat-pipe radiated intense heat, liquifying the animal fat before it even hit his gastric lining.
A warm, heavy tide of heat energy surged outward from his gut, flooding through his mesenteric arteries into his hardened melted rock waste-veins.
The hollow cramp in his belly vanished, replaced by the deep, rhythmic hum of satisfied muscle tissue.
He scooped a handful of icy water from the broken spring, swallowed it down to clear the salt from his palate. Then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Two cakes left,” Lu Chen muttered quietly.
Four pounds of animal fat would carry him across eighty leagues of mountain trails if he kept a steady march.
If he was forced into sustained combat, the blood-fire would burn through that fuel in six hours.
He re-tied the parcel, stowed it deep in the canvas sack beside Doctor Bai’s jar of bitter pine-resin lard. Then he hoisted the pack onto his left shoulder.
His right hand fell naturally to the handle of his weapon.
The notched ox-bone cleaver hung from his hemp belt in an open leather sword sheath.
Twelve pounds of dense, forged iron with an ox-thigh bone handle, pitted and notched from hacking through yamen spearmen and swamp ghouls.
Its balance was crude. But the sheer crushing mass of the spine was enough to crack an iron helmet like an eggshell.
Lu Chen rounded the rocky promontory and stepped back onto the main ridge.
The wind had died down, replaced by an eerie, choking dead quiet.
The mountain fog was thickening. That turned from pale morning gray to a greasy, yellowish white that clung to the wet pine needles like spider silk.
A flock of mountain crows sat in the bare branches of a stunted juniper above the trail.
There were forty of them, their feathers ruffled against the cold, their beady black eyes fixed entirely on the snowy gully thirty paces ahead.
None of them cawed.
None of them took flight as Lu Chen’s heavy boots crunched into the crust of old snow.
Scavengers only stayed this quiet when they were scared of what shared the clearing.
Lu Chen slowed his pace. His balance point dropped four inches as his weight passed silently from heel to ball.
In the hollow beneath a collapsed cedar trunk, three human shapes lay half-buried in the fresh snowdrifts.
They were huddled together under a thin, patchwork hemp blanket that was stiff with white frost.
At first glance, they looked like ordinary mountain travelers who had succumbed to freezing sickness during the night.
The Great Yong borderlands were littered with such corpses every winter.
Fugitives, bankrupt merchants, runaway conscripts.
Lu Chen stepped closer, his thumb resting against the square brass blade collar of his cleaver.
The smell reached him before he cleared the snow.
It wasn’t the sweet, rotten stench of putrefaction, nor was it the clean iron scent of fresh slaughter.
It was the dry, bitter-salt odor of desiccated parchment, mixed with the faint sweetness of rotten plum wine.
Lu Chen reached out with the iron toe of his boot and flicked the stiff hemp blanket aside.
Three men.
One was middle-aged, dressed in the padded blue cotton coat of a courier. The other two were younger, likely hired baggage porters in tattered sheepskin vests.
Their faces were sunken. Their skin drawn so was tight across their cheekbones that their yellow teeth protruded in rictus grins.
Every drop of moisture had been pulled from their flesh.
They weren’t frozen—they were mummified, light as bundles of dried reeds.
Lu Chen crouched beside the courier.
His dead-house training took over automatically, his eyes cataloging physical anomalies with clean, steady care.
No throat deep cuts.
No crushed ribs.
No defensive bruises on the forearms or shattered knuckles.
The men had died without ever throwing a punch.
Lu Chen glanced down at their feet.
All three corpses had their felt boots carefully removed and set aside in the snow.
Their coarse woolen socks had been rolled down to their ankles, exposing their bare, gray feet.
On the ball of each man’s big toe, right beneath the fleshy pad, was a single puncture wound.
The hole was circular, no wider than an embroidery needle, with edges as smooth and neat as if punched by an iron awl.
Around each puncture, the skin was stained a deep, bruised violet, streaming outward in five neat petals like an ink-drawn plum blossom.
Lu Chen reached out with two fingers and pressed the courier’s calf.
The flesh didn’t bounce back.
It crumpled like dry paper, hollow and brittle.
“Drained dry,” Lu Chen whispered.
Every drop of bright red blood, dark-blood fluid, and marrow moisture had been drawn out through that single tiny hole in the toe.
It wasn’t the crude feeding of a wild ghoul.
Swamp ghouls tore bellies open and chewed through intestines. Mountain ghouls cracked skulls to lick out the gray matter.
This was careful.
Ritualistic.
Lu Chen rose and examined the snow around the corpses.
There were no struggle marks, no claw tracks, and no bootprints leading away from the hollow.
Only two narrow, perfectly straight ruts in the snow, five feet apart.
They looked like the runners of an iron sled or the carrying poles of a heavy palanquin.
Except the ruts didn’t press into the dirt.
They hovered half an inch above the frozen gravel, barely brushing the top of the snow crust before vanishing into the swirling fog ahead.
Scattered along the edge of the ruts were several dozen discs of yellow joss paper.
Paper money for the dead, each sheet stamped with a hollow copper coin design.
Some of the discs were stained with drops of dark, frozen fluid.
Lu Chen picked up one of the paper coins between two fingers.
The paper was damp, but the dark spot was not ink.
It was dried human blood, still carrying a faint, nauseating trace of stale temple incense.
A low shaking rattled the limestone cliffs above.
High up on Old Crow Ridge, the northern wind shrieked through a narrow gap in the crags, sounding uncannily like the wail of a brass horn.
Lu Chen tossed the bloodstained paper into the snow and stepped back onto the main trail.
The fog thickened fast, swallowing the road in a solid wall of freezing white. Along the path, those straight, weightless ruts pointed directly up the pass, fresh paper coins fluttering in the rising draft.
Whatever had drained the couriers dry was moving ahead of him, hunting along the only road across the ridge.
Dusk was falling, and the sub-zero chill was sharpening its teeth. Lu Chen locked his hand around the cleaver’s ox-bone grip and surged up the slope before the darkness sealed the pass.