Loose black slate crumbled underfoot where the mountain trail twisted around a sheer cliff face into the gathering dusk.
High above, jagged limestone pinnacles tore the low clouds into ragged streamers of purple and gray.
Beneath the overhang of an ancient rockfall sat an abandoned roadside tea shack, hunkered against the cliff like a crushed turtle shell.
Its pine-pole frame groaned under the weight of three inches of crusted snow, the rotting bamboo straw roof sagging in long, rotten fringes.
Around the broken threshold, dozens of yellow paper funeral coins lay half-buried in the frozen slush.
Nearly all of them were smeared with rusty, dark-brown finger smudges.
Lu Chen paused at the edge of the clearing, his heavy boots sinking three inches into the snow crust.
His internal fire hummed with a deep, muffled rhythm. That kept his blood heat pinned at forty-eight degrees.
Steam coiled upward from the wet wool of his shoulders, dissolving into the freezing draft.
Inside the shack, there was no lantern light.
Yet to Lu Chen’s heightened senses, the structure was far from empty.
He could hear the shallow, ragged wheezing of three men trying desperately to control their breath behind the rotted timber walls.
He could smell them, too.
Stale sweat, wet dog fur, rancid sulfur grease, and the clear metal sourness of human terror.
Lu Chen reached back with his right thumb, easing the notched ox-bone cleaver half an inch out of its sword sheath to verify the draw.
The heavy iron blade slid smooth against the boiled leather.
He took four measured strides forward, his boots crunching rhythmically across the frozen threshold.
The inside of the tea shack was choked with gloom and the damp stench of moldering straw.
A broken clay stove sat in the center of the earthen floor, cold as a tombstone.
Beside the stove lay shattered pottery bowls, splintered pine benches, and several bundles of dirty traveling blankets.
“Step out,” Lu Chen said.
His voice was quiet, pitched low enough to avoid echoing off the limestone cliffs outside.
Silence stretched for three heartbeats. It was broken only by the wind rattling the loose straw roof overhead.
Then the rotted woven mat covering the back storeroom was wildly kicked aside.
Three men spilled into the room, fanning out in a rough semi-circle to cut off the door.
They were mountain bandits, gaunt and frostbitten. They were wrapped in patchwork coats of wolf pelt and greasy sheepskin.
The leader was a burly man with a crooked nose and a jagged scar splitting his left eyebrow down to his cheekbone.
He gripped a heavy, single-edged horse-chopper saber with both hands, the forged iron blade notched and pitted with old rust.
To his left, a younger bandit held a crude boar spear with a fire-hardened ash shaft.
To his right, a third man leveled a rusty woodsman’s hatchet.
All three were shivering wildly, their lips blue and cracked from the high-sky cold.
Their bloodshot eyes locked instantly onto the canvas pack slung across Lu Chen’s shoulder.
The smell of cured sheep fat and Doctor Bai’s rendered lard was rich enough to drive starving men mad.
“Look at that, brothers,” the scarred leader growled, baring yellow, broken teeth. “A fat sheep walked straight into the pen.”
“Drop the sack, traveler,” the spearman rasped, shifting his grip on the ash shaft. “Strip that padded coat and empty your boots, and maybe we let you crawl back down the ridge.”
“The coat stays,” the axeman snapped greedily. “I want the boots! Look at that leather—not a single tear!”
Lu Chen kept his feet planted.
His hands hung loose at his sides, fingers curved slightly in a relaxed grip.
He looked at the scarred leader’s stance. Weight shifted too far forward on the left knee. Elbows flared. Grip on the saber handle white-knuckled and trembling from muscle tiredness.
Mortal ruffians. Hardened by mountain robbery, but fully empty of internal training or refined bone-tempering.
“Step back three paces,” Lu Chen said.
“What did you say, dog-beggar?” the leader snarled, stepping forward with his saber raised. “You think you’re talking to yamen clerks?”
“The wind is cold,” Lu Chen said calmly. “Don’t waste blood.”
“Kill him!” the leader roared.
The burly bandit lunged forward, throwing his entire body weight into a vicious two-handed slanted chop aimed straight for Lu Chen’s neck.
The heavy iron blade whistled through the freezing air with raw, desperate driving force.
Lu Chen didn’t dodge.
His cleaver remained untouched in its sheath at his hip.
He simply raised his left hand, angling his forearm forty-five degrees to meet the incoming strike.
Across his slate-gray skin, the black glass melted rock waste-veins flared with dull, underground heat.
CLANG!
The heavy iron saber struck Lu Chen’s bare palm with the ear-splitting ringing impact of a blacksmith’s hammer hitting an anvil.
The razor-sharp edge didn’t bite into flesh. It met the hardened outer matrix of the Peak Flesh Tempering realm, heavy by the Molten Tiger Vajra art.
The skin didn’t break. The tiny blood vessels beneath didn’t burst. Instead, the four-hundred-degree heat streaming from his palm caused the freezing iron blade to hiss with flash-boiled frost.
The bandit leader’s eyes bulged in total, blank horror.
His wrists went numb from the violent recoil, the blast wave shaking straight up his forearms into his shoulders.
“W-What...” the leader stammered.
Lu Chen closed his fingers.
His grip clamped down on the thick iron spine of the saber like a high-pressure vise.
With a cold, measured flick of his wrist, Lu Chen twisted forty-five degrees counter-clockwise.
CRACK!
The three-finger-wide forged iron saber snapped clean in two, shearing like a brittle icicle.
Before the cut tip hit the dirt floor, Lu Chen closed the distance with a single half-step forward.
His right palm drove outward, striking the leader’s chest bone with the flat heel of his hand.
He withheld his full strength, deploying barely thirty percent of his available torque. It was more than enough.
The leader’s collarbone shattered with the wet, splintering sound of dry firewood snapping under a boot.
The crushing impact blew the two-hundred-pound man off his feet, launching him six paces through the air.
He smashed through the clay stove, shattering the baked earth into powder, before collapsing in a heap of broken pottery and blood.
The tracking data box dissolved into the dusty gloom of the shack.
The other two bandits froze where they stood. Their faces drained of whatever color the cold had left them.
The spearman stared at the jagged half of the iron saber still held loosely between Lu Chen’s fingers.
“Demon...” the spearman whimpered, his bladder letting go beneath his sheepskin coat. “A flesh-demon...”
The axeman dropped his weapon into the dirt. He fell to his knees so hard his patellas cracked against the frozen flat stone slabs.
“Mercy, grandfather!” the axeman shrieked, slamming his forehead into the blood-stained paper money on the floor. “We were blind dogs who failed to recognize Mount Tai!”
Lu Chen dropped the broken saber fragment.
It struck the stones with a dull iron clatter.
He walked over to the collapsed stove. There, the leader lay groaning, clutching his crushed shoulder with blood bubbling from his split lips.
Lu Chen crouched beside him, resting his forearm across his knee.
“Why is the paper money smeared with blood?” Lu Chen asked.
The leader gasped for air, his chest heaving unevenly around his broken ribs.
“The Nine-Mile Bride...” the leader sobbed, snot and spit freezing on his chin. “The Red Sedan...”
“Speak clearly,” Lu Chen said.
“Every nine nights, she crosses the high ridge,” the bandit wheezed, terror overcoming the agony in his bones. “A crimson bridal sedan carried by things that have no breath.”
“The paper money?” Lu Chen pressed.
“It’s the bride price!” the man cried. “If you’re caught on Old Crow Ridge after sundown, you have to smear your own bright red blood on nine paper coins and throw them into the snow.”
“And if you don’t?”
“She takes you as a groomsman,” the bandit shuddered, his teeth clicking together like dice. “Or her needle finds your feet and drinks every drop of blood from your toes to fill the bridal wine jars.”
Lu Chen’s eyes narrowed slightly.
The three mummies under the cedar tree on the trail.
Their rolled-down socks. The neat, punctured wounds beneath their big toes.
“Where is she now?” Lu Chen asked.
Before the bandit could answer, a sudden, unnatural gust of wind slammed into the front of the tea shack.
The rotting timber walls shuddered wildly.
Outside, the heat plunged through the floor, dropping ten degrees in the span of a single breath.
Frost began to crawl across the flat stone slabs. It spread inward from the threshold in delicate, needle-sharp crystal-clear fans.
From somewhere deep in the swirling fog of the mountain pass, a sound drifted on the freezing wind. The ear-splitting screech of a brass suona horn, with the muffled thud of unseen palanquin bearers marching through the snow.
The air turned to ice, frosting the doorframe as the heat crashed through the floor.
Lu Chen rose to his full height. His fingers locked onto the cold-iron spine of his cleaver as the bridal procession arrived at the threshold.