Lu Chen took half a step forward, the floorboards groaning as his weight shifted.
The two Eight-Tailed Yin-Foxes didn’t hesitate.
Cornered in the narrow timber hallway with their borrowed human disguises torn to ribbons, their primal survival instinct overtook their hungry cunning.
They lunged together.
The first fox bounded low along the floor. Its leftover bone claws scraped deep furrows through the cedar planks as it aimed to disembowel Lu Chen’s groin.
The second fox leaped off the splintered wreckage of the upper bunk, hurtling downward like a pale silver javelin aimed at his crown.
Their eight tails whipped behind them in a coordinated frenzy, generating a nearby blizzard of screaming, sub-zero frost needles.
He didn’t block with the flat of his blade.
Against two agile horrors in a confined hall, blocking was wasted motion.
He pivoted on the ball of his left foot. He swung the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver in a brutal, level cleave.
The heavy iron spine of the weapon shrieked as it carved through the freezing air.
THWACK!
The cleaver struck the dropping upper fox mid-air.
The sheer mass of the twelve-pound weapon, backed by the torque of Lu Chen’s lead-hardened shoulder girdle, sliced through the beast’s left flank like an axe through frozen pine.
Three ribs snapped. Two hind legs were cleanly cut at the hip joint.
The beast let out a strangled, bubbling shriek as it was swatted out of the air like a fly, crashing into the corner wall in a wet spray of black, freezing ichor.
At the exact same instant, the lower fox reached Lu Chen’s boots.
Its jaws snapped shut on his left shin.
CRACK!
The needle fangs that had flayed Merchant Qian’s flesh shattered against Lu Chen’s boiled-leather boot and the dense, lead-hardened muscle wall beneath.
The beast’s jaws shuddered from the moving recoil, its eyes rolling in stunned shock.
Before it could recoil into the straw, Lu Chen’s left hand shot downward like an iron bear trap.
His calloused fingers clamped around the back of the fox’s neck.
The beast thrashed wildly, its eight tails wrapping around Lu Chen’s left arm, trying to freeze his flesh with thirty degrees of sub-zero Yin rime.
The pale-blue ice crawled up his linen sleeve.
He ignored the frost.
He tightened his grip, feeling the dense neck bones beneath the matted silver pelt.
He twisted his wrist with a sharp, explosive snap.
CRUNCH.
The beast’s main spine nerve cut cleanly between the third and fourth spine bones.
The thrashing of its eight tails ceased instantly. Its limbs went limp, swinging like wet rags from Lu Chen’s fist.
He dropped the dead carcass onto the floorboards with a dull, wet slap.
Across the hall, the first fox was still alive.
Cut in half at the hip, the mutilated horror dragged its bleeding torso across the bloody floorboards. He clawed desperately toward the paper window at the far end of the hall.
It reached up with its leftover front paw, its claws hooking into the cedar doorstep.
A low, trembling whine escaped its broken muzzle—a sound of pure animal terror.
Lu Chen walked up behind it.
He didn’t raise his cleaver.
He dropped the twelve-pound weapon to his side, letting the iron tip rest against the wood.
Instead, Lu Chen reached out his bare right hand.
Beneath the slate-gray skin of his palm, the black glass melted rock waste veins pulsed with fierce, rhythmic heat, stoked by the burning of his internal fire.
He placed his open palm directly onto the center of the fox’s spine.
“Return the coat,” Lu Chen said.
He released the fire.
Sixty-five degrees of packed Yang heat erupted from his palm into the beast’s frozen marrow.
THZZZZZZZZZZT!
The sound was like a glowing branding iron being plunged into a barrel of pig fat.
A violent torrent of thick, greasy white smoke billowed from beneath Lu Chen’s hand, carrying the eye-watering stench of scorching pelt and boiling bone marrow.
The sub-zero Yin frost inside the fox’s skeleton tried to resist. But the molten heat of the Molten Tiger Vajra Body was overwhelming.
The frozen marrow inside the spine boiled, melted. Then he turned to steaming melted rock waste in less than three breaths.
The fox let out one final, choked burst.
Its silver-white fur blackened, shriveled into ash. Then he collapsed into a brittle, smoking heap of charred bone fragments.
Silence fell over the bunkhouse.
The only sound was the howling of the blizzard outside the shattered window and the steady, rhythmic hiss of steam rising from Lu Chen’s knuckles.
In the dark corners of the ceiling, faint, hallucinatory afterimages began to writhe.
Pale fox-faces with weeping human eyes drifted through his outer vision. He whispered fragmented, mocking curses into his ear.
The psychic residue of the Uncanny was attempting to latch onto his mind.
Lu Chen’s face remained expressionless.
He reached into his left sleeve with his right hand, drawing out the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl.
The rusted iron felt cold against his fingers.
He placed the square point against the thick callous of his left palm and drove it downward half an inch without pause.
Hot crimson blood welled around the iron shank.
A sharp, electric spike of gut-deep pain surged up his forearm nerve, cutting through the spectral whispers like a hot saw through animal fat.
The phantom fox shadows shattered into nothingness.
“Flesh breathes,” Lu Chen murmured into the cold air.
“Blood resists.”
“Anchor checked.”
The reality seam held firm.
He pulled the awl free, wiped the blood against his trouser leg. Then he returned the tool to his sleeve.
Behind his eyes, the Asura Crucible hummed with heavy shaking as two dense streams of purified spiritual malice were siphoned from the burning carcasses.
Seventeen hundred units of malice now circulated through his main spirit vein lattice.
Yet the body-energy cost was severe.
His blood heat had dropped to forty-nine degrees, his stomach clenching into a tight, painful knot as the blood fire starved for fuel.
Lu Chen reached into his canvas pouch, pulled out a thick, rock-hard slab of salted sheep fat. Then it bit off a large mouthful.
The dense animal fat tasted of sulfur and coarse salt. But it reached his stomach. Then, his stomach heat dissolved it instantly into rich, calorie-dense fuel.
The shivering in his limbs subsided.
Lu Chen picked up his notched ox-bone cleaver, slid it back into the hemp loop at his waist. Then it walked to the barred bunkhouse door.
He raised his right boot.
BOOM!
The four-inch iron bar across the outside of the door snapped with an ear-splitting screech of snapped metal.
Both halves of the heavy oak door flew open, slamming against the timber walls of the common hall.
Inside the hall, thirty men jumped as if thunder had struck the roof.
Station Master Han shrieked and dropped his brass counting frame into the peat embers.
Escort Leader Jiang and his eight guards stumbled backward. Their leveled spears shook wildly as they stared through the billowing clouds of white steam.
Lu Chen stepped through the ruined doorway.
His hemp cloak was soaked in black ichor. His knuckles were scorched black, steam pouring from his collar like the chimney of an iron foundry.
At his feet, the floorboards still hissed with leftover heat.
“Dead,” Lu Chen said.
His voice was flat, dry, and laconic.
“Both of them.”
Escort Leader Jiang stared past Lu Chen into the darkened bunkhouse. It caught sight of the charred bones and the cut limbs lying among the splintered bunks.
The veteran guard lowered his saber, his throat bobbing as he swallowed hard.
“You... You killed two Eight-Tailed Yin-Foxes with your bare hands?” Jiang whispered, his scarred face gray with disbelief.
“They were cold,” Lu Chen said.
Before anyone in the hall could draw another breath, a sound tore through the mountain night.
It didn’t come from inside the station.
It came from the snowbound cliffs rising three hundred paces above the wooden wall.
SKRRRRREEEEEEE-AAAAAAAH!
It was a shriek that sounded half like a grieving woman and half like a dying wolf, magnified tenfold by the rocky tiered arena of the Old Crow Pass.
The sound was so ear-splitting that the heavy ceiling beams of the post-station groaned under the sonic pressure.
The oil lamps throughout the hall flickered and died, leaving only the blood-red embers of the peat hearth.
Outside, the shrieking blizzard suddenly shifted pitch.
The falling white snow turned into a swirling vortex of pale crimson rime. It carried the choking stench of thousands of rotting slaughterhouses.
From beyond the timber wooden wall, heavy, rhythmic thuds began to shake the earth.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Station Master Han scrambled to the paper window, his trembling fingers tearing a hole through the oiled lattice to peer outside into the storm.
He looked down into the blizzard. Then, the old clerk’s jaw unhinged in total, paralyzing horror.
Outside the ten-foot hardwood gates, hundreds of figures were crawling out of the frozen snowdrifts.
They were upright, walking on two legs, yet none of them possessed skin.
Raw, glistening red muscle fibers twitched in the freezing gale. White tendons stretched over yellow joint padding as hundreds of flayed mountain corpses dragged themselves toward the station.
At their head, perched atop the jagged rocky crag above the gates, a massive nine-tailed white fox the size of a war elephant stared down through the crimson sleet.
Her face was not an animal muzzle.
It was the clean, fine china face of a royal noblewoman, weeping tears of black blood into the snow.
CRACK!
The heavy hardwood wooden wall gates bowed inward three inches under the weight of fifty rotting corpses throwing themselves against the timber.
“The Mother Fox...” Station Master Han cried, collapsing onto the floorboards in his own urine. “She brought the whole mountain!”
Lu Chen’s eyes stayed on the gate.
Three inches of give already, and hundreds more corpses waiting their turn behind the first fifty.
His fingers closed around the cold iron spine of his cleaver. That crossbar wouldn’t last until dawn. It might not last the quarter hour.