Jade light burst from the bronze mirror with a crackle like river ice splitting.
Lu Chen kept still inside the strangling grip around his neck.
At a distance of six inches, any backward jerk would expose the soft tissue of his throat to the direct line of fire.
He snapped his chin hard to the left, tucking his ear against his collar bone.
The beam of packed cryo-malice grazed his right cheekbone.
It wasn’t heat, but total, unnatural cold that scorched like boiling oil.
A strip of skin along his temple and jaw flash-froze instantly. That turned milky white as the moisture inside his cells crystal-hardened into ice.
Blistering frostbite bit through the epidermal layer down to the outer bone of his cheek.
Yet Lu Chen’s eyes remained flat and dead as river stones.
Pain was just nerve tracking data.
It told him his nerves were still conducting. It proved he was still breathing meat.
He didn’t waste precious energy wrestling against the corpse’s locked arms.
Instead, he changed the physical arena.
Lu Chen drew both knees upward toward his chest, shifting all his body mass into the air. Then he drove his iron-shod boots downward with eight hundred pounds of force.
Crash!
The charred, burning cedar floorboards of the Nine-Mile Red Sedan had already been weakened by flame and his fifty-five-degree blood.
Under the violent downward impact, the three-inch timbers exploded into a storm of glowing embers and jagged splinters.
The entire bottom of the bridal carriage blew out.
Deprived of their footing, both Lu Chen and the Mountain Bride plunged through the floor into the frozen mountain air below.
They fell five feet, crashing heavily onto the jagged limestone rocks and deep snowdrifts of the Old Crow trail.
The impact was brutal.
Snow billowed into a white cloud around them as frozen rocks gouged into Lu Chen’s back.
He rolled with the driving force, using his superior body mass and iron-dense muscle structure to leverage the corpse beneath him.
The bride thrashed wildly in the snow.
Her bronze talons raked through the dirt, throwing gravel and frozen pine needles as her desiccated legs kicked against his ribs.
Lu Chen slammed his left forearm across her mummified throat, dropping his full body weight across her larynx and pinning her skull against a jagged granite boulder.
Sssss!
His skin, streaming fifty-five degrees of fever heat, seared directly into the withered gray flesh of her neck.
Ancient rotting sinew bubbled and melted on contact. It filled the mountain air with plumes of foul, greasy black steam.
The corpse’s jaw dropped open beneath the bronze plate, its hollow throat issuing a choked, rattling gasp.
With his left arm pinning her down, Lu Chen looked at her chest.
The twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver was still firmly wedged between her third and fourth ribs. It was locked by stone-hard bone.
Prying the blade free would cost seconds he didn’t have.
The blade had already done its job. It had cracked the outer defensive vault of her chest cage.
Lu Chen balled his right hand into a dense fist.
He raised his arm and drove his bare, calloused knuckles straight into the fissure opened by the cleaver.
Crunch!
Frozen, brittle bone fragments snapped under the piston-like blow.
His fist sank four inches deep into the bride’s chest cavity. He plunged into a mass of dried, rotten-egg tomb grease and stone-hard organs.
Deep beneath the chest bone, his fingers closed around cold, rigid metal.
The eight-sided bronze mirror was not merely a mask pinned to her skull.
Its roots—eight jagged tangs of ancient, green rust-crusted bronze—extended through her neck spine bones and anchored directly into the hollow where her heart should have been.
The cursed bronze was acting as an artificial, spirit fire, pumping cold malice through her desiccated tendons.
The moment his fingers clamped onto the bronze tangs, a wave of biting frost surged into his hand.
The cold was vicious, threatening to freeze his marrow solid and blacken his fingernails with black flesh-rot.
“Found your heart,” Lu Chen said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
He didn’t let go.
He dug his knees deep into the frozen dirt, engaging his broad back muscles and the deep steadying fin muscles of his lower-back spine.
He twisted his wrist ninety degrees. He locked his grip around the bronze anchor, and ripped upward with over a thousand pounds of pure butcher torque.
Snap! Crack! Tear!
The sound was like ancient iron nails being wrenched from stone-hard oak beams.
The bronze tangs tore free from her upper-back bones in a violent spray of congealed, black corpse oil and green sparks.
With a final, savage yank, Lu Chen ripped the eight-sided bronze mirror fully out of her chest and skull.
The Mountain Bride stiffened instantly.
Her back arched into a violent, rigid bow, her clawed hands clawing futilely at the empty mountain air.
A high-pitched, dying groan rang through her hollow ribs as the spirit circuit powering her corpse was cut.
He spared the ancient object no second glance.
An oddity was dangerous as long as its physical form remained intact.
He shoved the writhing corpse aside, slammed the eight-sided bronze mirror face-down onto the flat surface of the granite boulder. Then he yanked his twelve-pound cleaver free from her shattered ribs.
He gripped the wooden handle with both hands, raised the heavy blade high above his head. Then he brought the iron spine down with everything his Flesh Tempering could muster.
Clang-shatter!
The heavy iron edge split directly through the center of the bronze plate.
The cursed mirror fractured along its ancient solder lines, exploding into dozens of jagged green shards that scattered across the crimson-stained snow.
The drowned silhouettes trapped within the metal shrieked one last time, bursting outward in a cloud of pale, harmless gray vapor that faded away into the freezing wind.
As the mirror shattered, a massive suction force pulled through the air.
A dense torrent of pure, raw Uncanny malice—dark as squid ink and cold as deep-sea trench water—erupted from the shards and the dying corpse.
It swirled around Lu Chen’s arms, drawn inexorably toward the glowing Asura Crucible within his belly.
The demonic energy poured through his pores. It hissed as his internal blood fire burned up the dark fuel.
The tracking data pulse vanished into his eyes.
Fifteen hundred units of malice absorbed.
His total reserves had surged to twenty-seven hundred units. The largest concentration of spiritual fuel he had ever gathered.
At his feet, the body of the Mountain Bride collapsed into the snow.
Without the cursed mirror to preserve the corpse, hundreds of years of delayed decay caught up with the dead flesh in seconds.
The desiccated skin withered into dry, papery flakes. The black tendons crumbled into oily sludge. And the stone-hard bones crumbled into brittle white powder.
Within half a minute, nothing remained of the fearsome mountain horror except for a pile of greasy gray ash, a few cracked beads of funerary jade, and tarnished copper threads scattered across the slush.
Lu Chen exhaled a long plume of scalding white steam.
His knuckles were bruised, the skin on his right cheek swollen with frostbite blisters. But his pulse beat with steady, clockwork care.
Above him, a loud, splintering groan echoed through the mountain gorge.
The wooden shell of the Nine-Mile Red Sedan, stripped of the bride’s floating curse, could no longer float.
Engulfed from roof to floor in roaring orange flames. The burning cedar carriage was tilted on its side, groaning under the weight of collapsing timber. Then it came crashing down through the night sky directly toward his head.