An ear-splitting splintering crack echoed through the ceiling beams of the post-station common hall.
The heavy spruce rafters, burdened by three feet of packed snow and the weight of the beast above, buckled wildly.
CRASH!
Half of the second-story roof collapsed inward in an avalanche of shattered tiles, rotten laths, and blinding white snowdrifts.
Down through the gaping maw of the ceiling dropped the Centenary Yin-Fox.
The impact shook the stone foundation of the hall, overturning frame stand tables and sending fine china jugs clattering across the floorboards.
In the center of the debris, the beast uncoiled.
It was massive, its snow-white torso easily ten feet from snout to rump, its seven bushy tails whipping like heavy hawsers.
Fitted seamlessly over its vulpine skull was the withered, waxy face of an ancient royal concubine, complete with silver hairpin filigree rooted into the bone.
Its empty eye sockets cried thick trails of black, greasy frost that hissed against the timber floor.
A terrible, choking pressure filled the room.
The heat plummeted past thirty below zero in the span of three breaths.
The moisture in the merchants’ lungs turned to razor-sharp ice crystals. It set off a chorus of choking, strangled coughs.
Station Master Han collapsed behind the overturned tax desk. He grabbed his throat as his lips turned a bruised violet.
The Mother Fox opened its waxy, painted mouth.
There was no tongue inside. Only a pulsing, dark-blue cluster of needle-shaped bone spurs shaking in a wet throat sac.
ZZZZZT!
A volley of over a hundred bone-needles sprayed across the common hall like iron flechettes.
Two caravan escorts standing near the pantry never had a chance to raise their bucklers.
The needles punched through boiled leather and wool coats, sinking three inches into their sternums and throats.
Before the men could even cry out, a layer of blue rime spread from the puncture wounds, freezing their eyeballs solid and locking their jaws in a death grimace.
They toppled backward like statues of blue marble.
Lu Chen moved.
He didn’t retreat behind cover.
Cover was an illusion against high-speed bone fragments driven by centenary Yin power.
He drove his right boot into the oak floor, launching his frame forward with explosive gaining speed.
His twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver came up in a high slanted guard, shielding his main neck blood vessel and eye sockets.
PING-PING!
A dozen bone-needles slammed into the heavy iron spine of the cleaver. It shattered into clouds of white bone dust.
Three needles bypassed the blade, plunging deep into Lu Chen’s left shoulder and pectoralis major.
A blast of sub-zero rotting poison surged into his flesh, trying to freeze his heart into an icicle.
“Insignificant,” Lu Chen murmured under his breath.
Inside his dantian, the Asura Crucible roared like a bellows in a forge shop.
His blood, boiling at sixty-five degrees, met the frozen Yin poison in his tiny blood vessels.
Tssssss!
A sharp hiss of escaping steam vented directly from the puncture wounds on his chest.
The extreme heat of his bright red blood denatured the rotting venom within half a second, neutralizing the frost before it could touch his heart-sac.
The Mother Fox hissed, its waxy human face twisting in disbelief.
Two of its heavy, fur-matted tails whipped forward like iron cudgels, aimed directly at Lu Chen’s temple and ribs.
Lu Chen dropped his balance point by six inches, ducking the first tail while bracing his left forearm against the second.
The crash carried more than two thousand pounds of blunt force.
THUD!
The impact drove Lu Chen’s boots two inches into the splintered floorboards. It sent a jolt of sideways tearing force through his upper arm bone.
His hardened bones, hardened by Half-Step Bone Forging, absorbed the shock without a single fracture.
Before the tail could retract, Lu Chen dropped his cleaver’s handle knob. He clamped his left arm around the thick, frozen tail like an iron vise.
With his right hand, he drove the notched edge of his cleaver downward.
CHOP!
The iron spine bit through dense fur, fatty tendon, and tailbone, severing the tail in a single brutal chop.
A geyser of black, freezing fox blood sprayed across the floorboards.
The Mother Fox let out a shrieking wail of agony that shattered the leftover clay roof tiles above them.
The beast lunged forward, snapping its jaw toward Lu Chen’s throat. At the same time, its right foreleg—tipped with three-inch talons of frosted iron—raked across his chest.
Lu Chen stepped inside the radius of the strike.
He abandoned defensive recovery.
He drove his left fist directly into the creature’s lower jaw, dislocating the joint with a sickening wet crunch.
At the same time, his right hand reached out and seized the main bone-needle cluster shaking in its open throat.
The needles tore into his palm. His grip only tightened.
He locked his fingers around the root spur, planted his feet. Then he wrenched the entire cluster free from the beast’s joint padding with a horrific tearing of rotting sinew.
The centenary root-needle left the creature’s flesh. Then, a massive wave of dense, packed Yin malice flooded into Lu Chen’s palm.
It was bitter, icy, and ancient—the distilled resentment of a hundred years of mountain slaughter.
The Asura Crucible in his chest flared with blinding golden-red radiance.
The tracking data glyphs flared and dissolved behind Lu Chen’s eyes.
Eight hundred units of purified malice poured into his dantian, instantly burned up by the roaring core.
The energy didn’t scatter into his spirit veins.
It redirected outward, surging down the upper-arm artery of his right arm and funneling directly into the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
The cleaver shuddered wildly in his grasp.
Fresh bright red blood from Lu Chen’s wounded palm was sucked greedily into the porous iron spine and notched bone edge.
The dull, pitted iron began to change.
Tiny fractures in the metal, piled up through dozens of battles with corrupted corpses, sealed themselves under intense heat-powered smelting.
The melted rock waste-veins in Lu Chen’s arm rang with the iron spine. It formed a seamless circuit of heat flow between his living bone and the cold weapon.
Along the flat of the twelve-pound blade, jagged, crimson veins etched themselves into the steel. It glowed like molten magma beneath fiery crust.
The notched bone edge hardened, darkening from dull yellow into a glossy, black glass-black sharpness.
The weapon became scalding hot, reaching over three hundred degrees in two seconds.
The grease and frozen grime caked on the surface combusted instantly. It burned away in a thin sheet of blue fire.
The moisture in the surrounding air flash-boiled around the blade, cloaking the cleaver in a dense, hissing sheath of white vapor.
The notched spine rang with a deep, hungry hum. It shook in exact sync with Lu Chen’s sixty-five-degree pulse.
Calamity Cleaver: Blood Forge.
No longer merely a butcher’s tool of mundane iron and dead cattle bone.
It was now an awakened instrument of slaughter, bound directly to his blood heat and hardened by ancient malice.
The weapon’s balance shifted. It felt as light as balsa wood in his calloused hand yet possessing the crushing moving potential of an iron anvil.
Across the ruined hall, the Mother Fox staggered back three paces. She grabbed its torn jaw with a clawed foreleg.
Black demonic bile dripped through its talons, freezing into dark stalagmites on the floor.
Its leftover tails twitched wildly, beating the floorboards in wild, defensive rhythm.
The waxy concubine face had lost its mocking arrogance. Its painted lips were pulled back in a snarling grimace of primal terror.
For the first time since it had dropped from the high mountain crags upon Black Crow Post-Station, the centenary demon looked at a mortal man not with hungry hunger, but with shivering, pure dread.
In the corner beneath the stairs, Station Master Han and the surviving escorts stared in stunned silence.
They saw Lu Chen standing wrapped around in billowing white steam, veins of molten crimson pulsing through his bare arm and along the length of his smoking cleaver.
He looked less like a county dead-house apprentice and more like an ancient demon of slaughter stepped out from the underworld.
Lu Chen raised the smoking cleaver, bringing the blade to eye level.
The heat streaming from the edge dried the sweat on his brow in an instant.
His eyes were cold, calm, and entirely devoid of pity.
“Your turn,” Lu Chen said.