Black mud sucked at Lu Chen’s boots with every stride through the willow marsh.
Above the stale water, the night air hung thick with the stench of rotting reeds and sour canal silt. It was two hours past the curfew gong. The Seventh Ward border had dissolved into a freezing gray soup.
Behind him, Old Meng dragged his lame left leg through the muck, the iron tip of his hickory heavy club striking buried river stones with a dull clink.
“Step light,” Old Meng rasped, his voice scraping like dried husks. “Silt eats boots.”
Lu Chen kept his pace. “I see the markers.”
Beneath his coarse linen smock, Lu Chen’s core was burning at an unnatural forty point two degrees. The night fog curled against his jawline and instantly turned to faint plumes of steam. It drifted off his shoulders like smoke from a dying fire bowl.
Along his left forearm, the change was even more pronounced.
The backup spirit veins had hardened during the breakthrough in the morgue, transformed into dark, glassy channels of black glass melted rock waste. They throbbed beneath his slate-colored flesh with a dull, heavy ache. Not the clean pulse of mortal blood, but the high-pressure heat of trapped steam inside an iron boiler.
Every yard they pushed into the marsh demanded fuel. His stomach gave a low, hollow growl that shook against his ribs.
“Reeds don’t rattle without wind,” Old Meng said, halting suddenly in the mire.
Lu Chen stopped beside him. He lifted his right hand, resting his palm on the coarse wrapped handle of his twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
The marsh had gone fully dead.
Ten paces ahead, the croaking of the fat mud-toads cut off in mid-breath. A layer of crystal-clear hoarfrost spread across the surface of the black water, crackling as it crept outward from the willow roots like white spiderwebs.
The heat plummeted five degrees in three heartbeats.
Lu Chen’s skin tightened. His feverish core, streaming outward into the sub-zero damp, was a bonfire burning in an empty deep pit.
In this world, the Uncanny didn’t merely wander. It starved.
To the things that crawled beneath the frozen silt of Black Water County, a mortal running at forty degrees was not just food. It was a blazing feast.
A low, whistling wail leaked from the tangled willow branches.
The mist churned, twisting into a ragged funnel of pale blue vapor that hovered two feet above the stale water.
It possessed no true limbs or face. At its center was a gaping oval of hollow frost, ringed by elongated talons of needle-sharp river ice that drifted on the air like frozen cobwebs.
Old Meng’s good eye went wide beneath his gray brow.
“Frost-wisp!” the old watchman barked, spitting sulfur wine into the mud. “Back into the ditch!”
Meng swung his hickory heavy club in a desperate two-handed sweep. The iron metal ring crashed straight through the blue funnel. But mundane wood and pig-iron found no purchase against incorporeal mist.
The strike met only empty air.
A razor-sharp screech tore through the marsh as the wisp’s frost coiled down the heavy club. In a split second, the seasoned hickory wood turned chalk-white, the grain snapping along the core with a sound like a snapped axle.
The rotting recoil slammed Old Meng backward, his boot slipping in the frozen silt as he tumbled into the black mud.
“Steel won’t bite it!” Meng wheezed from the muck, clutching his frostbitten forearm. “Run, boy!”
Lu Chen didn’t run.
Running drained stored energy, and stored energy was the only thing keeping his blood hot against the frost.
He stepped directly between Old Meng and the hovering specter, planting his boots firmly into the underwater clay.
The Frost-Wisp coiled like a striking viper. Drawn by the surging heat plume streaming from his collar, it dove straight for Lu Chen’s throat.
The air froze in his windpipe. Needle-sharp ice crystals scraped across his cheekbones, numbing his eyelashes in an instant.
His cleaver stayed in its wraps.
Iron would freeze and shatter, just like Meng’s hickory staff. Incorporeal horrors laughed at steel.
Instead, Lu Chen raised his bare left hand.
The hand corded with black glass melted rock waste-veins. The hand that held the Asura Crucible’s brutal, scorched channels.
Ox-Demon Iron Skin, Tier Five.
He drove his open palm directly into the center of the frost funnel.
There was no sound of a blow landing. There was only the violent, screaming hiss of red-hot iron plunged into a trough of freezing animal fat.
The specter’s icy talons clamped down around Lu Chen’s fingers, attempting to flash-freeze his veins down to the bone. Sub-zero Yin-frost collided head-on with forty-degree molten blood.
For half a second, black rime bloomed across Lu Chen’s knuckles, turning his skin to gray slate.
Then the fire roared.
Deep inside his lower belly, the Crucible flared. High-pressure heat surged down the hardened black glass veins of his left forearm. That turned the dark melted rock waste into a searing channel of pure burning.
Steam blew up from his palm in a blinding white cloud.
The Frost-Wisp let out a shrill, bubbling shriek that rattled the reeds. Its pale blue vapor twisted wildly, trying to pull away from his grip. But Lu Chen’s fingers clamped shut like an iron vice.
Flesh couldn’t touch mist—unless that flesh carried the crushing weight of refined Yang heat.
“Stay,” Lu Chen whispered under his breath.
He squeezed.
The blue funnel collapsed inward with a hollow pop. It dissolved into a shower of warm, gray water droplets that splashed harmlessly into the mud.
The bitter marsh cold vanished, replaced by the heavy smell of scorched canal silt and boiled river grass.
Lu Chen stood in the darkness, his left arm still trailing thin wisps of white steam into the midnight air.
Then the recoil hit his gut.
It wasn’t pain, but a sudden, terrifying emptiness. A hollow cramp seized his stomach so wildly that his chest muscle locked, his breath catching in his throat.
Three hundred and fifty kilocalories had been ripped from his living reserves in less than three seconds to sustain that burst of burning.
His blood heat dipped a fraction of a degree. Instantly, the black glass melted rock waste-veins along his forearm stiffened, throbbing with a brittle, crystal-clear ache that signaled the threat of freezing seizure.
He clenched his fist slowly, testing the tendon tension. The fingers moved, but they were stiff.
Behind him, Old Meng struggled up onto one knee. He stared at Lu Chen with his single eye stretched so wide the bloodshot veins were clearly visible.
The old watchman looked at the shattered remains of his hickory heavy club, then at Lu Chen’s bare, unburned palm.
“You grabbed a ghost,” Meng croaked, his voice trembling against the cold.
Lu Chen lowered his arm, pulling his cuff down over the blackened veins. “Skin is thick enough.”
“Thick skin don’t boil frost,” Old Meng muttered, hauling himself up against a willow trunk.
He unhooked the dented gourd from his belt and thrust it toward Lu Chen.
“Drink this,” Meng said. “Stiffens the blood.”
Lu Chen took the gourd, pulled the wooden stopper with his teeth. Then he tilted three swallows of raw sulfur liquor down his throat. The burning alcohol scorched his throat-pipe, but it did nothing to fill the bottomless void in his gut.
Ethanol was empty fire. His blood demanded dense, solid fats to lubricate the melted rock waste-veins and sustain the blaze.
“Uncle Meng,” Lu Chen said, handing the gourd back. “My blood is hungry.”
Old Meng wiped his gray beard with a muddy sleeve, his gaze lingering on the steam still curling from Lu Chen’s collar.
“You’re burning through your marrow,” the old man said grimly. “I’ve seen old guard post fighters push their breath too hard. Their guts rot from the inside out.”
Lu Chen nodded once. “I need fuel.”
“You need sheep fat, boy,” Meng said, his tone turning dead serious. “Or beef animal fat. Heavy, salt-cured lard.”
“Is the price fair?” Lu Chen asked.
“Nothing in Seventh Ward is fair,” Meng spat into the frosted mud. “The meat stalls open at dawn. But the Iron Fist dogs have their paws on the carts.”
Lu Chen looked east, toward the dark shape of the county wall where the first pale hint of gray dawn was beginning to bleed into the fog.
“I’ll go to Butcher Row,” Lu Chen said.
“Watch your step,” Old Meng muttered, picking up his ruined heavy club. “Tie Shan’s students don’t like strangers sniffing around the animal fat pots.”
Lu Chen adjusted the heavy strap of his ox-bone cleaver against his ribs.
His fire was ticking downward with every breath. If he didn’t feed it before noon, the cold would take what the specter couldn’t.