Oak boomed against stone as the door between the outer stable yard and the inner compound slammed shut.
Lu Chen dropped a four-inch iron bar into the forged brackets with a dull, ringing clang.
“Pry up the stones,” Lu Chen ordered.
His voice was flat, leaving no room for argument or pause.
The scarred escort captain didn’t question him.
With a hoarse shout, the captain jammed his iron crowbar into the seams of the granite courtyard pavers.
Three other guards rushed forward, throwing their weight onto the iron levers until stone slabs cracked and came free in thick, mossy chunks.
Within five minutes, they had gouged a trench four paces wide and a foot deep straight across the threshold of the inner courtyard.
“Empty the salt bags,” Lu Chen said.
Station Master Han and two weeping mule drivers hauled the coarse rough rope sacks from the pantry.
They slashed the hemp ties with skinning knives, dumping thirty pounds of coarse rock salt directly into the earthen trench.
The gray stone crystals crunched under their boots like gravel.
Lu Chen kicked the salt, spreading it evenly across the ditch.
To normal living flesh, rock salt was an irritant.
To the exposed, flayed muscle tissue of Yin-puppets, sodium chloride induced instant osmotic collapse, tearing cell membranes and curdling rotting lymph.
Behind them, four heavy cast-iron cooking pots were hoisted onto stone fire-rings.
The escort guards rolled out two five-hundred-pound casks of rendered sheep fat, splitting the pine staves with their poleaxes.
Dense, waxy slabs of yellow sheep fat were shoveled into the cooking pots in massive lumps.
“Kindling won’t take!” a young escort cried out, his flint striker sparking uselessly against the frost-dampened pine shavings.
“The ghost wind is freezing the tinder!”
The air was indeed turning solid. It dropped past twenty below zero as the Centenary Fox’s domain settled over the compound.
Frost crystals were forming on the iron lips of the cooking pots.
Lu Chen walked over to the central fire-pit.
He didn’t reach for flint or oil.
He thrust his bare left hand straight into the mound of wet, cold charcoal beneath the first cooking pot.
The escort guard recoiled with a gasp.
Inside Lu Chen’s chest, the Asura Crucible flared.
His blood heat spiked from sixty-five degrees to seventy-two in less than two heartbeats.
The charcoal melted rock waste-veins lining his outward bone and wrist joints ignited with an intense, ember-crimson glow beneath his skin.
Intense, high-pressure heat energy poured from his palm into the damp fuel.
FWOOM!
The moisture inside the pine shavings boiled instantly. The charcoal erupted into blinding white-hot coals.
A roar of dry heat washed across the courtyard, instantly driving away the frost.
Within sixty breaths, the dense slabs of animal fat began to break down.
The yellow fat melted, bubbling and churning in the cast-iron pots as the heat surpassed two hundred degrees.
Thick, pungent clouds of boiled away mutton grease rolled into the night air. He smelled of scorched fat and animal fat candles.
“Line the trench,” Lu Chen said, pulling his hand from the fire.
His palm was black with soot, but his flesh was fully unmarked by the burning coals.
“When the wood splits, tip the pots.”
CRACK-SHATTER!
The outer wooden wall gate didn’t merely give way. It blew up inward under the crushing pressure of the horde.
Ten-foot hardwood timbers snapped like dry kindling, spewing jagged wooden splinters across the stable yard.
A tide of flayed, skinless horrors poured through the gap.
There were over forty of them, tumbling over one another in a wild, rabid swarm.
Their wet, crimson muscle bundles glistened in the firelight, dripping foul, freezing serum onto the snow.
Without skin to regulate their movement, their tendons twitched with ugly, spastic speed.
They ran on two legs, on four. They dragged shattered pelvises and out-of-joint shoulders, their yellowed teeth clicking like castanets.
Leading the charge was the flayed corpse of a royal courier, its chest cavity split open to reveal an empty ribs crawling with pale-blue fox-fire.
The courier lunged toward the inner threshold, its jaw unhinging to let out a wet, whistling hiss.
“Now,” Lu Chen commanded.
The escort captain and his strongest guard shoved long timber poles against the handles of the two front cooking pots.
The cast-iron vessels tilted.
A boiling clouded eye of two-hundred-degree mutton fat surged out, cascading in a thick, golden sheet across the stone flags.
The scalding wave flooded the shallow trench, washing over the beds of coarse rock salt before spilling out into the entry lane.
The vanguard of the skinless horde charged directly into the trench.
The crash was total.
Boiling animal fat hit exposed muscle tissue and cut nerve endings with the sound of meat thrown onto a searing skillet.
SSSSSSSS!
Dense, choking clouds of white fatty steam erupted instantly, obliterating the frozen air.
The flayed ghouls shrieked.
It wasn’t a human sound, nor an animal one. It was the shrill, sound agony of corrupted souls having their anchors to the flesh dissolved.
The white-hot animal fat instantly melted their rotting gristle.
At the same time, the coarse rock salt dissolved in the boiling fat, biting into the raw muscle tissue like millions of tiny razors.
The chemical shock overwhelmed the demonic fox-threads animating their marrow.
Muscle tissue curled, blackened, and peeled away from the underlying bone in greasy strips.
Dozens of ghouls collapsed in the ditch, thrashing wildly. Their cooked tendons snapped and tightened, curling their limbs inward like roasted spiders.
“Hold the flank!” the escort captain roared, his courage returning as he saw the horrors burn.
He brought his poleaxe down, cleaving the skull of a crawling ghoul in two.
Yet the sheer driving force of forty bodies couldn’t be entirely halted by the trench.
Several of the larger corpses—flayed oxen and hulking caravan porters—scrambled across the writhing carpet of their burning kin. They clawed their way toward the raised threshold.
Lu Chen stepped forward.
His twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver swept in a low, flat level arc.
The iron spine cut through the freezing steam with a heavy, whistling hum.
THWACK-CRACK!
The notched edge caught the flayed courier across the midsection.
The striking force of the swing was total.
Hardened by Half-Step Bone Forging, Lu Chen’s hip torque drove through the creature’s lower-back bones like a butcher’s wedge through a dry log.
The courier’s upper torso flew three paces into the air, spinning twice before crashing into the fire-pit.
A flayed mountain hound lunged at Lu Chen’s throat, its exposed jaw snapping shut an inch from his cheek.
He drove his left elbow downward with tuned care.
CRACK.
His hardened olecranon process crushed the hound’s neck spine against the stone paver, pulverizing the spine bones into chalky paste.
He stepped forward, his heavy boots crushing charred ribs and boiling fat with every pace.
Each swing of his cleaver was economical, brutal, and devoid of dramatic flourish.
He struck only the load-bearing pivots—the neck, the hip joint, the base of the skull.
Wherever his cleaver struck, bone fractured and black marrow sprayed.
The leftover escorts cheered, thrusting their spears into the writhing ghouls trapped in the boiling animal fat.
For five breaths, it seemed the defense had held.
Then, the heat in the courtyard plunged by forty degrees in a single second.
The boiling animal fat in the trench suddenly ceased its sizzling.
A thick crust of gray, greasy ice spread across the surface of the fat, freezing the oil into a brittle, solid slush.
The roaring charcoal fires in the fire bowls turned dull indigo, their heat suffocated by an overwhelming tide of Yin frost.
Above them, on the snow-laden roof edges of the post-station’s second-story roof, a massive shadow shifted.
The Mother Fox stood atop the ridge tiles, her seven snow-white tails fanning out like a wall of frosted spears against the blizzard.
Her fine china woman’s face stared down into the courtyard. Her empty eye sockets were locked onto Lu Chen.
The waxy mouth twisted into an ugly, mocking smile.
She didn’t howl.
She opened her jaws, and from the black throat cavity within, a thousand pale bone-needles glinted in the dim fox-fire.