Fire fell out of the sky.
The burning frame of the Nine-Mile Red Sedan plunged toward him like a toppling watchtower, far too heavy to catch or brace against.
He dug his back heel into the frozen shale, throwing his weight laterally in a low, controlled roll through the snowbank.
BOOM!
The cedar carriage slammed into the stone trail with an ear-splitting crash that echoed down the mountain canyon.
Dry timbers, aged velvet cushions, and paper magic charms exploded upon impact, exploding into a geyser of scarlet sparks, shattered beams, and black soot.
The unnatural floating was broken. The Uncanny oddity was dead.
Within seconds, the mountain wind caught the flames, reducing the ancient sedan to a roaring funeral pyre that crackled greedily in the sub-zero night.
Lu Chen pushed himself up from the snow.
His breathing came in short, disciplined rasps, his chest heaving under the weight of spent hard effort.
In the corners of his vision, the world warped.
Phantom images flickered across the smoke. The weeping face of an ancient noblewoman, the high-pitched wail of suona wedding pipes, and the phantom sensation of freezing canal water pouring down his throat pipe.
The psychic residue of fifteen hundred units of harvested malice was attempting to corrode his mental faculties.
If a martial artist allowed those lingering death echoes to anchor in his sea of mind, madness and spirit vein deviation followed before dawn.
Lu Chen reached into his left sleeve.
His fingers clamped around the pitted iron shank of his four-inch bone awl.
Without a second’s pause, he slammed the square point downward. He drove half an inch of rusted iron directly into the thick callous of his left palm.
Thump.
A sharp, electric jolt of gut-deep pain shot straight up his forearm nerve, cutting through the spectral hallucinations like a butcher’s blade through rotten twine.
Scalding crimson blood welled up around the shank, dripping onto the sizzling snow.
“Flesh breathes,” Lu Chen said, his voice flat, quiet, and unmoving.
“Blood resists.”
“Anchor checked.”
The reality seam snapped shut with unchanging finality.
The weeping bridal voices shattered and dissolved into the cold mountain air.
Lu Chen pulled the iron awl from his palm, wiped the blood against his trousers. Then it slid the tool back into his sleeve.
He focused his attention inward. There, the Asura Crucible in his lower belly was spinning with dizzying speed.
Twenty-seven hundred units of purified malice swirled within the spiritual forge. It glowed with dense, violet-black soft glow.
He didn’t hesitate.
Survival in the northern wilderness didn’t permit hoarded potential.
One-Click: Advance Molten Tiger Vajra Body.
The tracking data flare died, replaced by pure, blinding body agony.
Inside his chest, an iron water gate was kicked wide open.
Fifteen hundred units of harvested malice ignited at the same time, transforming into a torrent of high-pressure, boiling Yang fire that flooded his blood-vessel network.
Sizzle!
The heat was monstrous.
Human spirit veins were never designed to channel thousands of degrees of purified heat.
Across his chest, collarbones, and upper ribs, dozens of backup collateral vessels were scorched to their cellular limit, burning away fragile blood-vessel tissue and hardening into dense, glassy black glass melted rock waste.
Beneath the slate-gray skin of his chest, a fine, detailed lattice of black melted rock waste veins emerged. It wrapped around his ribs like a linked breastplate of fiery iron.
His resting inner body heat, which had hovered at forty-eight degrees, surged wildly upward.
Fifty degrees.
Fifty-eight degrees.
Sixty-five degrees.
A roaring pillar of white-hot white steam exploded outward from every pore in Lu Chen’s body.
The vapor blew up through his clothes with the force of an opening boiler valve, tearing open the charred seams of his vest and billowing ten feet into the night air.
The immediate environment suffered an instant heat-powered inversion.
The surrounding frost covering the mountain trail couldn’t endure the radiant output of a sixty-five-degree living fire.
Within three paces of Lu Chen’s iron-shod boots, the packed snowbank hissed wildly.
Drifts of ice three feet deep melted in seconds. That turned into bubbling, boiling slush that washed over the frozen shale before evaporating into rising sheets of mist.
Snowflakes dropping from the black sky boiled away into tiny puffs of steam three paces above his head, unable to touch his bare shoulders.
Within that three-pace radius, the frozen earth dried, cracked. Then he scorched under the sheer heat wave of his blood.
Yet the living law of the Asura Crucible was total.
Energy couldn’t be summoned from nothingness.
The moment the breakthrough locked into place, a vicious, debilitating body-energy cramp seized Lu Chen’s stomach.
His belly wall tightened until it felt like a knotted hemp rope. He pulled his torso forward in a burst of raw body hunger.
At sixty-five degrees, his cellular engine was consuming calories at a sky-high rate.
His liver stored energy was gone. His fat under the skin stores were burning away like dry tinder.
If he failed to provide immediate high-thickness fuel to lubricate his scorched melted rock waste-veins, the fire would begin digesting his own internal organs. That triggered freezing collapse and cellular black rot.
“Fuel,” Lu Chen rasped through cracked, dry lips.
He dropped to one knee in the boiling mud. His fingers shook with violent tremors as he unbuckled the straps of his canvas sack.
He reached inside, bypassing his spare socks and salt pouches, and grabbed Doctor Bai’s parcels.
He tore through the grease-stained wrapping paper.
Inside were four dense, yellow cakes of dried sheep-animal fat mixed with coarse salt, along with two jars of rendered pig marrow.
No utensils. No fire.
He shoved half a block of solid sheep-animal fat into his mouth, his jaw chewing through the stiff, salty fat with clockwork urgency.
The animal fat was cold and greasy, coating his tongue and throat in thick animal oil.
He swallowed it down in heavy, dense lumps, right away following it with a second block.
The moment the packed animal fat reached his stomach, his blood went to work.
The sixty-five-degree blood surrounding his stomach tract combusted the animal fat like kerosene thrown onto a glowing forge.
A surge of thick, healing medicine warmth spread outward from the pit of his stomach through his scorched melted rock waste-veins.
The violent belly cramps eased.
The tremors in his fingers subsided, replaced by a deep, terrifying physical balance that rang straight down through his leaden thigh bone bones into the bedrock below.
He stood up slowly.
He was six-foot-one, his muscles corded like iron cables beneath slate-colored skin, his chest steaming like a charcoal kiln in the winter night.
Around his boots, the ground remained clear of snow, a dry, smoking circle of black stone carved out of the mountain wilderness.
Suddenly, the wind stopped.
The eerie silence lasted for less than two breaths.
Then, from the jagged peaks of the Black Mountain Range above, the sky turned into a dark, bruised void of churning purple-black clouds.
The wind returned—not as a mountain draft, but as a shrieking, total blizzard.
Gale-force winds tore through the Old Crow canyon. It carried blinding walls of driving snow and ice crystals hard enough to peel bark from pine trees.
The heat plummeted past forty below zero in a matter of minutes.
Normal travelers, royal couriers, and even Bone Forging martial artists would freeze to death within half a league in a storm of this size.
Lu Chen reached down, picked up his twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver. Then it wiped a smear of animal fat across the notched iron blade.
He sheathed the cleaver at his hip, slung his canvas travel sack over his broad shoulder. Then he looked down the winding northern pass.
Through the shrieking whiteout, three leagues ahead along the ridge, lay the hardwood palisades of the Black Crow Post-Station.
Lu Chen lowered his head and strode into the teeth of the blizzard, leaving smoking footprints in the snow.
Three leagues of whiteout. Forty below, and still falling.
Two and a half cakes of animal fat stood between him and the cold. If they ran out before the wooden wall came into sight, the storm would finish what the bride had started.