Behind him, the heavy oak door slammed shut, cutting off the shriek of the blizzard.
Inside the common hall, the silence was thick enough to carve with a blade.
Lu Chen paused on the threshold. His oilcloth coat, soaked with melted snow, hissed in the sudden warmth of the room. Dense clouds of white steam billowed from his collar and cuffs. It curled toward the soot-stained pine rafters like incense in a ghost shrine.
Around the central hearth, thirty men sat frozen.
A fire of dried mountain peat and pine roots burned in the sunken pit. It cast amber shadows across weathered faces, drawn daggers, and hardwood chests. The air reeked of wet wool, sour sweat, cheap wine, and boiling mutton fat.
Lu Chen scanned the room.
To the east sat nine armed escorts in iron-studded brigandines, clustered around a veteran with a nine-ring broadsword and a nervous merchant clutching a counting frame.
To the south sat a delicate youth in emerald silk and fox fur, sipping yellow wine. It was flanked by two motionless retainers.
In the shadowed western corner, two trappers scraped dried sinew from a wolf pelt.
None looked innocent. In the borderlands, innocent men died young.
“Close the latch!” a scarred escort barked, his hand on his dagger. “You’re letting the blizzard in.”
Lu Chen dropped the oak bar into its iron brackets and walked toward the western wall. His steaming footprints hissed against the frosted timber.
“Sit down, Tie Gou,” the veteran with the nine-ring blade murmured. “A man whose blood boils like that will snap your neck before you draw. Drink your broth.”
Lu Chen unslung his satchel beneath a cedar pillar and sat down.
The wooden bench groaned under his weight. Within ten breaths, the cold pine beneath his thighs was warm to the touch.
A station hand—a skinny youth missing two teeth, his apron stiff with grease—shuffled over. That kept five paces of careful distance. His eyes darted nervously to the twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver strapped across Lu Chen’s spine.
“Master traveler... What do you take?” the youth asked, his voice trembling slightly.
“Sheep fat,” Lu Chen said. His voice was flat, level, carrying no dramatic edge. “Two bowls. One loaf of barley bread. A pot of boiling water.”
The youth blinked, his mouth parting in confusion.
“Just... Pure animal fat?”
“Yes.”
“No stew? No dried turnip?”
“Animal fat.”
The boy swallowed hard, wiped his hands on his apron, and scrambled back toward the kitchen trench.
Lu Chen leaned his back against the cedar pillar.
Beneath his skin, the black glass melted rock waste veins pulsed with a slow, heavy rhythm. The external heat of the room was a welcome relief to his scorched spirit veins. It allowed his blood fire to throttle down from sixty-five degrees toward a sustainable balance.
The system tracking data flickered across his eye nerve before dissolving into darkness.
The station hand returned quickly, setting down a crude wooden tray.
Upon it rested two clay pot bowls filled with thick, congealed sheep fat, white as lard with specks of coarse gray salt, alongside a heavy dark loaf of barley bread and a steaming clay pot of boiling well water.
He broke a chunk of the rock-hard bread, dipped it into the thick grease. Then he chewed with slow, rhythmic smooth speed. He poured boiling water over the second bowl of animal fat, stirring it with a wooden chopstick until the fat melted into a shimmering, golden soup of pure animal calories.
He lifted the bowl and drank it down in three long draughts.
Scalding grease poured into his stomach.
To an ordinary mortal, drinking half a pound of molten sheep fat would trigger violent nausea and bile reflux. To Lu Chen’s scorched viscera, it was high-grade fuel. The liquid fat was seized by the Molten Tiger Vajra engine in his lower belly. He was broken down, and converted directly into dense body-energy heat.
The tight, clawing hunger in his ribs loosened.
Across the room, the caravan escorts watched him with varying degrees of disgust and dread. Even the hardened mountain hunters paused their skinning knives. They stared at the lone traveler who burned up boiling grease as though it were spring tea.
Lu Chen wiped his chin with the back of his rough sleeve.
He lowered his head, his senses extending across the room.
Something was wrong.
It wasn’t the hostile stares of the guards or the nervous fidgeting of the merchants. That was normal in a border station crowded with desperate men.
It was the smell.
Beneath the choking stench of wet dog-fur coats, peat smoke, and sour beer, there was an undercurrent. A faint, sickeningly sweet scent.
It smelled like cold pork lard mixed with river clay and stale well water.
Lu Chen tilted his head slightly.
Near the woodpile, a massive northern mastiff—a beast with shoulders as wide as a calf, chained to an iron ring in the wall—lay curled tight.
The dog was not sleeping.
Its yellow eyes were wide, staring fixedly at the center of the room. Its gray gums were pulled back in a silent, shuddering grimace, its ribs trembling beneath its wire coat. A wooden trencher filled with greasy mutton scraps sat untouched three inches from its snout.
A mastiff bred for mountain wolves didn’t shiver from cold inside a heated lodge.
It shivered from malice.
“Brother Qian, have another cup of the pear-blossom brew,” the merchant with the counting frame called out nervously, trying to break the heavy gloom of the hall. “The storm will pass by mid-day tomorrow. We’ll cross the plateau together.”
The young man in the emerald fox-fur coat smiled.
His teeth were small, perfectly straight, and fine china white.
“Much obliged, Brother Zhao,” Qian Song said. His voice was soft, melodic, with the gentle cadences of the southern river counties. “The mountain cold enters the bones quickly. My stomach feels weak tonight.”
He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a silk handkerchief.
Lu Chen’s eyes narrowed.
The man’s hand was graceful, but as he lifted the handkerchief, his sleeve shifted.
The skin of his wrist was unusually smooth—not a single hair, pore, or freckle. In the amber glow of the peat fire, the flesh had the dull, waxy translucency of boiled pig bladder.
Qian Song pushed himself up from the bench.
His movements were fluid, yet there was an uncanny lack of weight to his stride. When his leather boots struck the floor, there was no creak from the dry pine timber.
“Pardon me, gentlemen,” Qian Song said, bowing with exaggerated elegance to the room. “The cold wine presses on my bladder. I must visit the rear trench.”
“Watch the steps down the back hall, sir,” Station Master Han called out from behind the counter, scraping animal fat from an iron pan. “The snow’s drifting through the roof edges back there. Don’t slip into the cesspit.”
“I shall be cautious,” Qian Song replied softly.
He turned toward the narrow, unlit hallway leading to the rear outhouse and wood storage sheds.
As the silk merchant vanished into the dark hall, his shadow stretched across the rough pine wall.
Lu Chen watched the shadow.
For half a second, as the shadow crossed the flicker of the peat flame, the outline on the timber didn’t look like a slender man in wide robes.
It looked like something low, elongated, with a pointed snout and many trailing tails.
Then the shadow passed into the darkness, and the wall was empty.
Lu Chen held still. His fingers stayed on the rough wooden table, but his thumb slid under his left sleeve.
He touched the cold, square point of the iron bone awl.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
Outside, the blizzard roared with sudden, redoubled fury, rattling the roof timbers until dust sifted down between the planks. The magic charm bells on the watchtower gave a muffled, frozen clang.
Ten minutes passed.
The peat fire burned down to glowing red embers. An escort threw two more damp bricks into the pit, sending up a foul cloud of rotten-egg smoke.
“What’s keeping that southern dandy?” the scarred escort, Tie Gou, muttered, spitting on the floor. “Taking a piss shouldn’t take half an incense stick. Did he fall into the shit trench?”
“Xiao Wu,” Station Master Han grunted, wiping a wooden flagon with a dirty rag. “Take a lantern down the hall. Make sure the merchant hasn’t frozen to the seat. If a royal guest dies of cold in my station, the county yamen will fine me three months’ rations.”
“Aye, Master Han,” the younger sentry groaned.
Xiao Wu picked up an iron grease-lantern from the counter, struck a spark onto the wick. Then it walked toward the rear hall, his heavy boots clattering against the floorboards.
His footsteps pulled back into the darkness.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Then the footsteps stopped.
The silence that followed was unnatural. Even the howling wind outside seemed to pause, held at bay by a choking, freezing pressure.
Three seconds passed.
Then, from the depths of the rear hall, a sound erupted that didn’t belong to a rational human mind.
It was a wet, gasping screech. A shriek of raw, pure terror that choked on its own vomit and tore through the smoky warmth of the hall like a cleaver through gristle.