Eight bone daggers came together on Lu Chen’s vital points like striking vipers.
The paper bearers possessed no mortal muscle, meaning their strikes suffered no clockwork windup. They sped up instantly. They closed five paces in a fraction of a breath, leaving thin trails of emerald-green corpse venom sizzling in the sub-zero air.
Lu Chen stood his ground without retreating.
Stepping backward would force his boots into the knee-deep snowdrifts at the edge of the ridge, sealing the path-yielding taboo.
Instead, Lu Chen planted his left heel into a frost-rimed fissure in the granite flat stone slab, dropped his balance point three inches. Then it drove his twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver upward in a violent, slanted sweep.
CRACK-SHATTER.
The notched iron spine of the heavy cleaver smashed through three converging daggers.
Human bone—long brittle from hundreds of years in grave dirt—shattered under twelve pounds of driving force backed by peak flesh-tempering leverage. Yellow bone splinters peppered the granite stones like buckshot.
Yet the leftover five paper bearers didn’t break their assault.
Two bone points plunged straight toward Lu Chen’s throat. Another two drove for his main thigh blood vessels. Meanwhile, the fifth stabbed directly into his left flank.
Lu Chen twisted his torso by a finger’s width, sacrificing non-vital flesh to protect his neck-artery vessels.
Tch-tch.
Three bone daggers pierced his coarse linen tunic, their poisonous tips digging into the slate-gray meat of his ribs and right thigh.
A normal martial artist’s flesh would have cut instantly. It allowed the rotting corpse venom to flood the bloodstream and putrefy the liver within two breaths.
The bone daggers pierced a tiny fraction of an inch before grinding to a violent halt.
Beneath Lu Chen’s skin, layers of lead-hardened muscle tightened with the thickness of cured ox-hide. The bone blades hit the unbending muscle wall, bowing under the huge sideways push.
Snap. Snap.
Two of the yellowed thigh bone daggers snapped clean in half against the iron-dense meat of his ribs.
At the wound sites, emerald-green corpse venom met Lu Chen’s blood.
His blood was not the tepid liquid of an ordinary man. It was liquid melted rock waste running at fifty-two degrees, thick with the hungry malice of the Asura Crucible.
The moment the rotting poison touched his tiny blood vessels, it didn’t spread.
It boiled.
A sharp, foul hiss erupted from the puncture wounds as the venom instantly scorched into toxic green vapor. The skin-burning smoke puffed out through the holes in his tunic, smelling of burnt hair and rotten pond reeds.
The system pop-up alert flared briefly across his eyes.
Lu Chen drew a deep, freezing breath of mountain air into his swelled chest muscle.
His heart surged, hammering like a blacksmith’s trip-hammer against his hardened ribs. Deep inside his chest, the charcoal-black melted rock waste veins wrapping his collarbones ignited with a dull orange glow through his taut skin.
“Burn,” Lu Chen whispered.
He didn’t shout. He simply released the internal pressure valve.
BOOOOOOM!
A bone-shaking blast wave of white-hot white steam blew up from every pore of his chest, shoulders, and arms.
The expanding cloud of high-pressure vapor was not ordinary kettle steam. It carried the packed Yang heat of fifty-six-degree bright red blood. It blasted outward in an eight-foot ball-shaped wave that instantly engulfed all eight paper bearers.
Paper-doll magic charms were forged of cold Yin corpse-oil and dried mulberry pulp. They thrived in freezing grave dirt and damp river mist.
Against a sudden burst of three-hundred-degree high-pressure steam, their fragile spirit structure collapsed.
The moist, scalding blast struck the paper effigies with physical bone-shaking force.
The bleached paper instantly absorbed the boiling water droplets, waterlogging the enchanted parchment. Within half a second, the boiled wheat paste binding their joints dissolved into sticky slop.
The garish red stone circles ran down their cheeks like tears of wet blood.
Their painted slit smiles melted, sliding down their peeling paper chins in smeared streaks of crimson ink.
SCREEEEEECH!
A chorus of shrill, ear-splitting screams erupted from the dissolving paper dolls. The noise sounded like hundreds of bats being scorched alive in a chimney pipe.
The leftover heat trailing the steam blast caught the dry bamboo armatures beneath the melting paper.
Sparks leaped across the waterlogged parchment.
In a fraction of a breath, three of the paper bearers burst into bright orange flame, their frail frames crumbling into fluttering clouds of greasy black soot.
Lu Chen surged forward through the scalding cloud, his heavy boots crushing granite frost into powder.
He didn’t wait for the fire to finish them.
Grip shifting on the ox-bone cleaver, Lu Chen stepped into the center of the leftover paper dolls.
He pivoted his hips. He drove the twelve-pound iron blade in a flat, level arc with the full torque of his lead-hardened lats.
THWACK.
The heavy cleaver tore through two bamboo-framed torsos at the same time. The brittle rib cages snapped apart like dry firewood, throwing clouds of shredded paper money and rotting stuffing across the snow.
A fourth paper doll, its face half-melted, lunged toward his eyes with a jagged bone fragment.
Lu Chen dropped his cleaver hand, reached out with his bare left arm. Then it caught the effigy by its slender bamboo throat.
His palm, streaming sixty degrees of skin heat, clamped shut.
Sssssssss.
The paper neck charred black beneath his calloused fingers. Lu Chen bent his forearm, squeezing with seven hundred pounds of grip pressure.
The bamboo spine crumbled into powder with a dry crunch.
Lu Chen slammed the headless paper torso onto the stone flags, stomping down with his iron-shod heel. The wooden armature splintered to kindling beneath his boot.
He spun on his back heel, cleaver falling in three rapid, chopping strikes that hammered the last two thrashing effigies into wet, burning ribbons of pulp.
The ear-splitting shrieks of the paper constructs suddenly died away.
Silence reclaimed the Old Crow Mountain pass. It was broken only by the crackle of burning paper and the steady hiss of steam rising from Lu Chen’s shoulders.
The bronze characters flashed and vanished.
Lu Chen stood amidst the burning debris on the narrow trail, his breath coming in measured, deep cycles.
A sharp cramp twitched across his lower belly—the immediate living cost of the steam explosion. His core had burned up over a thousand calories in three seconds to generate that heat blast wave.
If he ran out of living fuel in this sub-zero pass, his melted rock waste-veins would freeze solid, shattering his backup spirit veins like brittle glass.
Lu Chen reached into his canvas pouch without looking down.
He pulled out two dried sheep-animal fat cakes, stiff and yellow with grease. He shoved the first cake whole into his mouth, chewing the dense fat with grinding back teeth, swallowing the heavy mass before tearing into the second.
The animal fat hit his stomach. Then, the cramp in his core pulled back, soothed by the fresh influx of animal oil.
He wiped a smear of black ash from his jaw and looked ahead.
On the granite stones before him, the eight paper bearers were gone, reduced to smoldering heaps of wet soot and charred bamboo.
Yet the ornate crimson bridal sedan had not touched the earth. It remained hovering six inches above the stone flags, perfectly motionless, draped in its funeral silk.
Then, from within the darkened inside of the carriage, came a slow, shuddering breath out.
It was a woman’s sigh, heavy with hundreds of years of tomb dust, bitter regret, and choking hatred.
The sigh swept over the clearing like an arctic gale.
The rising steam from Lu Chen’s shoulders froze in mid-air. It fell to the stones as delicate white frost. Beneath his boots, the three-foot-thick royal granite cracked with the sound of an iron bell tolling in the dark.