The bronze talons lunged for his throat.
Lu Chen didn’t retreat. Inside the cramped cedar doorway of the Nine-Mile Red Sedan, there was no space for a backward step.
He drove his left forearm forward, meeting the strike with the slate-hardened meat of his wrist.
CLANG!
Sparks erupted in the freezing dark. The curved bronze finger guards skidded across his iron-hardened skin like dull chisels across granite, scoring shallow white grooves into his flesh without drawing blood.
A blast of sub-zero corpse air rolled over him from the hollow cabin. He carried the stench of funeral musk, bitter pine-resin wax, and hundreds of years of undisturbed tomb mold.
In the center of the crimson velvet cushions, the Mountain Bride sat upright, her desiccated frame draped in a blood-clotted court wedding gown.
Her sunken jaw was unhinged three inches past the mortal threshold. She exposed a throatless maw lined with needle-thin bone teeth.
And directly below her collarbone, embedded into her split chest bone and surrounded by fused rib-teeth, pulsed the ancient eight-sided bronze mirror.
Eight rusted iron tangs curled around her ribs, pinning the mirror to her chest cage like the legs of an iron spider. The tarnished metal surface swirled with dark, oily shadows that seemed to drown beneath the polished bronze.
A dull amber glow flickered across the lower periphery of Lu Chen’s vision, sharp and cold against his eye nerve.
The tracking data pulse faded into the frost.
Fifteen hundred units of malice.
That was more packed demonic energy than the entire corpse-pit of Black Water County had produced in a month.
The bride’s fingers twitched against her silk-draped thighs.
They were long, blackened by frostbite, tipped with curved bronze finger guards inlaid with tarnished kingfisher feathers.
Crack. Snap. Crack.
Her dead spine straightened against the velvet cushions with the sharp, violent pops of freezing green bamboo breaking under weight.
The eight-sided bronze mirror tilted upward, aiming its dark, swirling surface directly at Lu Chen’s chest.
Then the Mountain Bride shrieked.
It wasn’t a human voice.
It was a sound cryo-blast wave, born from the hollow deep ring of the bronze mirror and the hollow cave of her desiccated ribs.
The sound tore through the air like screaming brass bells dragged across jagged granite.
The sheer sound pressure struck Lu Chen in the chest like an iron-faced battering ram.
His boots skidded back three inches through the frozen dirt, the gravel under his soles screeching in protest.
Around them, the ancient mountain forest suffered instant devastation.
The sub-zero blast wave radiated outward in an expanding white ring of sky distortion.
Thirty paces away, three centenary black pine trees froze solid in less than half a breath.
Their resin crystal-hardened, their sap turned to ice. Their massive trunks burst with the sound of exploding cannon shot. It crumbled into showers of glass-sharp emerald needles.
Snowdrifts covering the mountain ledge vanished into fine white vapor, blasted away by the bone-shaking empty pocket.
The sound clawed directly at the time bones of Lu Chen’s skull.
A warm trickle of red welled from both of his ears and dripped down the sides of his jaw, freezing before it reached his collar.
His vision blurred as the liquid jelly of his eyeballs began to chill under the direct heat drain.
Heat-flow drop: forty degrees in two seconds.
Inside his chest, the Asura Crucible roared in violent defense.
His inner body heat flared from forty-one degrees to forty-nine degrees in a single beat of his heart.
The blood within his scorched melted rock waste-veins surged like boiling river water. It sent plumes of thick white steam pouring from the collar of his oilcloth coat and the seams of his leather trousers.
The rime on his brow melted into hot droplets that hissed as they hit his cheeks.
“Steady,” Lu Chen muttered between clenched teeth.
His voice was a flat, low rasp, lost beneath the shrieking gale of the oddity.
The bronze mirror on the bride’s face flared with a sickly, eerie-glowing green glare.
In the dark surface of the bronze, Lu Chen caught sight of a distorted glow.
It wasn’t his own face.
It was a gray, hollow corpse with milky eyes, its chest torn open to reveal a frozen, withered heart wrapped in frostbitten hair.
The moment the glow entered his pupils, a terrifying mental pull dragged at his mind.
A heavy numbness spread outward from his main spine nerve, as if freezing well water were being pumped directly into his bone marrow.
His fingers began to lose their grip on the cleaver’s handle.
His muscles slowed, cold lethargy weighing down his thoughts like lead shot.
The taboo rule was engaging: The glow consumes the marrow.
Lu Chen didn’t blink.
Turning his head would only expose his throat to the incoming strike.
Instead, his left hand slipped into his wide oilcloth sleeve.
His fingers found the familiar, four-inch unpolished iron bone awl.
Without a second of pause, Lu Chen drove the square point of the iron tool straight down into the thick callous of his left palm.
Half an inch of cold iron punched through the leathered skin into the dense muscle beneath.
Pain—sharp, electric, and scalding hot—exploded along his median nerve.
Boiling crimson blood welled around the rust-pitted shank, dripping onto the cedar floorboards of the sedan.
The intense physical shock cut the spirit tether of the mirror in a single violent snap.
The icy lethargy in his spine vanished, burned away by the surge of fight-or-flight rush and authentic pain.
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked.”
Lu Chen spoke the words quietly, his voice hard as iron.
The reality seam locked back into place.
The bride’s shriek faltered for a split second, the deep ring broken by his total mental pushback.
Then, from beneath the stitched scarlet veil that hung behind the bronze mirror, her hair erupted.
It wasn’t normal hair.
It was thousands of coarse, pitch-black strands, thick as pig bristles and stiff as hardened iron needles, soaked in sticky funeral animal fat.
The hair whipped forward like an expanding black net. It hissed through the freezing air as it sought to pierce his eyes, nostrils, and throat.
Lu Chen took a half-step forward, planting his lead foot directly onto the sedan’s threshold.
He lowered his stance, contracting his broad back muscles and driving his right shoulder into the swing.
The notched ox-bone cleaver arced through the frozen mist in a brutal, sweeping crescent.
Shhh-clang!
The iron edge met the swarm of corpse hair with the sound of scythes cutting through barbed wire.
Sparks showered across the velvet cushions, burning tiny smoldering circles into the ancient silk.
A dozen thick clumps of black hair fell away, their cut ends writhing on the floorboards like wounded centipedes before dissolving into greasy black puddles.
The stench of scorched corpse fat and sulfur filled the cramped doorway.
Inside the cabin, the Mountain Bride rose to her feet.
She stood nearly six feet tall, her slender, desiccated frame swaying with unnatural, jerky balance as if suspended from invisible ceiling ropes.
The eight-sided bronze mirror on her skull gleamed with renewed, evil green fire.
Her arms swept upward, scarlet sleeves falling back to reveal withered bone wrapped in blackened tendons.
Bronze-tipped talons lunged, whistling through the narrow frame as they drove directly for the hollow of Lu Chen’s throat.