A sub-zero sigh from within the sedan struck the mountain stones like a hammer of solid ice.
A choking, rotting chill billowed out from the weeping black cedar carriage. It rolled across the granite flags in thick waves of creeping white frost. The heavy scarlet silk drapes fluttered wildly, rippling and swelling as though buffeted by an invisible gale surging from the depths of a mass grave.
Lu Chen took half a step forward, his boots crunching against the ice.
Instantly, the sense fabric of the mountain pass began to warp.
The howling wind died to an eerie, deadened hush. The jagged limestone crags of Old Crow Mountain faded from his vision. It melted away into shimmering panels of red stitched silk, carved bitter pine-resin-wood screens, and tall bronze stands holding flickering red animal fat candles.
The bitter stench of burnt paper and cold soot vanished fully.
In its place drifted the cloying, intoxicating fragrance of crushed plum blossoms, spiced wedding wine, and sweet bridal powder.
A woman’s voice—soft, weeping, and agonizingly tender—whispered directly against the tympanic membranes of his ears.
“Husband,” the voice cried, shaking with desperate longing. “Why stand outside in the bitter frost when you can drink the nuptial cup with me?”
The illusion was not merely a trick of light and shadow.
It was an invasive psychic parasite clawing at his central nervous system.
A creeping numbness spread upward from his boot soles, turning his calf muscles heavy as lead. His blood flow began to slow down, the internal fire dipping from fifty-two degrees toward forty-two degrees in the span of three heartbeats.
If his blood heat dropped below forty, the fire would stall.
The black glass melted rock waste veins wrapping his collarbones would freeze into brittle stone. That triggered a violent freezing seizure that would rupture his main heart artery.
Lu Chen’s expression stayed impassive.
His dark eyes remained cold, analytical. Then he entirely unswayed by the phantom warmth of the bridal candles.
He neither closed his eyes to meditate nor recited Daoist incantations to royal gods that had long abandoned this rotting realm.
Instead, Lu Chen slipped his left hand into his coarse canvas sleeve.
His fingers closed around the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl.
The metal was rough, pitted with ancient forge-hammer marks and crusted with dried sheep grease. He drew the awl from his sleeve and set its square iron tip against the thick, yellowed callous of his left palm.
Without a heartbeat of pause, Lu Chen clenched his fist and drove the iron spike half an inch deep into his own meat.
Squish.
Hot, dark-crimson blood—steaming at fifty-four degrees—welled up around the rusted shank of the awl.
A savage, white-hot spark bolt of agony rocketed straight up his median and outward nerves, searing through his brain cortex like a branding iron through wet spiderwebs.
Pain was the total, rock-solid anchor of mortal flesh.
The red silk canopies, the glowing wedding candles, and the sweet fragrance of plum blossoms shattered into jagged psychic splinters, evaporating into the mountain air.
Reality crashed back into place with the bone-shaking force of an avalanche.
The howling sub-zero wind roared in his ears once more.
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked.”
Lu Chen whispered the words into the freezing gale.
The reality seam held firm.
With the illusion stripped away, Lu Chen saw the immediate living truth. During those two seconds of mental distortion, his feet had carried him within arm’s reach of the hovering sedan door.
Through the parting in the blood-red drapes, two hands shot outward.
They were desiccated, gray-white claws, long dead and mummified by hundreds of years of grave cold. Tarnished gold rings and cracked jade bands bit into the withered skin of their knuckles, their fingers tipped with four-inch horn talons the color of rotting charcoal.
The claws thrust straight for Lu Chen’s chest bone, moving with the silent, terrible speed of a headsman’s axe.
They carried a sub-zero aura of total black rot, designed to pierce the ribs and freeze the mortal heart into a block of black ice.
He dropped his shoulder by three inches without retreating. That let the grasping talons skim across the top of his collarbone.
The freezing aura brushed against his coarse linen tunic. The fabric instantly frosted white and shattered into hundreds of brittle, icy fragments. He exposed the slate-gray muscle wall beneath.
A line of white frost raced across his skin. But the raging Yang core inside his vessels flared in furious defiance.
The frost sizzled to steam before it could bite into his bone.
Lu Chen closed the distance, planting his lead-weighted front boot on the stone flags and driving his shoulder into the corner post of the cedar sedan.
BANG.
The violent crash sent a shuddering blast wave through the floating carriage, arresting the corpse’s driving force.
He dropped the iron awl back into his sleeve.
Raising his left hand—dripping with hot, fifty-four-degree bright red blood—Lu Chen clamped his calloused fingers directly onto the thick scarlet silk curtain.
The cursed funeral fabric hissed furiously as the boiling Yang blood scorched its weave. The stitched headless cranes began to twist and writhe like dying worms.
Lu Chen rooted his boots into the granite flags.
He dropped his hips, engaged the tendon coils of his thighs. Then he drew the entire clockwork torque of his back and shoulders into a single, explosive heave.
“Off,” Lu Chen grunted.
RRRRRRIIIIIP!
With a ferocious, violent roar of tearing fibers, the heavy curtain tore clean off its bronze mounting rings.
The bronze characters flared across his vision before dissolving into the mist.
The torn scarlet curtain fluttered away into the sub-zero gale, tumbling across the snowdrifts like a discarded shroud.
The inside of the weeping cedar sedan lay fully exposed.
Seated upon a moldering cushion of damp crimson velvet was the Mountain Bride.
She wore the decaying ritual wedding robes of an ancient Great Yong noblewoman, the faded gold embroidery crusted with dark, hundreds of years-old bloodstains. Her body was a desiccated skeleton wrapped in tight, parchment-thin gray skin that clung to her cheekbones like wet thick parchment.
A long, cracked pearl bridal veil hung crookedly from her matted black hair. It exposed half of her sunken, mummified face.
In the center of her chest, where her chest bone had been wildly cracked open, sat a four-inch eight-sided bronze mirror.
The mirror was not tied or resting on her robes.
It was surgically grafted into her rotting ribs, held in place by blackened, stone-hard tendons that pulsed with a faint, nauseating rhythm. Its tarnished surface didn’t reflect the twilight or the falling snow.
It reflected Lu Chen’s own face—twisted upside down, with black blood weeping from his pupils.
Around the edges of the mirror, ancient magic charms were carved directly into the stone-hard bone of her ribs. It glowed with an evil, sickly soft glow.
The cold mountain wind rushed into the open sedan. Then, the bride’s sunken head jerked upward with the sound of grinding stone.
Her jaw unhinged, dropping three inches past the mortal threshold, exposing a dark, throatless cave lined with needle-thin bone teeth.
A soundless, bone-shaking shriek of pure spirit hatred erupted from the depths of her hollow chest.
The air pressure inside the sedan imploded, blowing out the cedar lattice panels and sending showers of black splinters whining through the freezing fog.
Deep inside her hollow eye sockets, two pinpricks of pale green phantom fire flared to baleful life as her curved bronze talons lunged for his throat.