Greasy, rainbow-bright ripples warped the air inside the ruined common hall.
The scent of burning sheep fat and spilled bile vanished in an instant, replaced by the cloying sweetness of jasmine incense and stale court perfume.
Across the splintered floorboards, pale shadows flickered into being.
Ghostly silhouettes of young palace maidens with painted red lips and stitched silk robes drifted through the falling snow. It wept softly into their long sleeves.
“Mercy, my lord... Spare our mother...”
The phantom voices murmured directly inside Lu Chen’s hearing canals, soft as warm breath on an earlobe.
At the same time, the jagged rafters above twisted into carved lacquered pillars, attempting to rewrite his sense reality with an ancient royal pavilion illusion.
Lu Chen’s breathing rhythm never changed.
With his left hand, he drew the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl from his sleeve.
Without breaking stride, he drove the square point half an inch into the thick callous at the base of his left thumb.
STAB.
Dark crimson blood welled around the rust-pitted shank, scalding hot against his skin.
Gut-deep, electric pain flared up his forearm nerve, cutting through the fragrant incense like a cold iron blade.
“Flesh breathes,” Lu Chen muttered, his voice flat and unbending.
“Blood resists.”
“Anchor checked.”
The court maidens and lacquered pillars shattered into gray smoke, swept away by the howling mountain draft.
There was only the ruined hall, the driving snow, and the snarling beast crouching five paces before him.
The Mother Fox recognized that her centenary illusions had failed.
Driven to primal madness, the beast let out a screech that loosened the leftover plaster from the walls.
All six of its leftover tails stiffened, coating themselves in jagged layers of semi-clear blue frost.
They shot forward at the same time, moving like a bundle of iron giant crossbow bolts aimed at Lu Chen’s chest, throat, and thighs.
Lu Chen stepped forward into the attack.
He swung the Calamity Cleaver: Blood Forge in a tight upward slanted slash.
The molten crimson veins along the twelve-pound iron spine flared with blinding intensity.
SHING-CRACK!
The awakened edge met the frost-sheathed tails.
Mundane steel would have shattered against the centenary ice. The blood-forged cleaver didn’t even shudder.
White-hot to over three hundred degrees by Lu Chen’s blood heat, the black glass bone edge sliced through the frozen tails like a heated iron through cold wax.
Three tails cut instantly, spraying clouds of boiling fox marrow and sizzling gray fur across the snowdrifts.
The leftover three tails struck Lu Chen’s torso.
BANG!
The impact tore through his charred apron, bruising his between-rib muscles and driving him back half a pace.
His hardened ribs absorbed the load, the calcium lattice ringing like a struck iron cooking pot.
Before the beast could retract its surviving tails, Lu Chen closed the distance.
His left hand shot out like an iron claw. He clamped around the thick nape of the Mother Fox’s neck.
The beast’s waxy concubine face snapped wildly sideways, its unhinged lower jaw trying to bite into Lu Chen’s wrist with broken needle-teeth.
Lu Chen let it try.
He planted his left boot against the beast’s left shoulder joint, locked his lower-back spine. Then he carried out a brutal hip throw.
BOOM!
The ten-foot beast slammed onto its back against the heavy oak floorboards with the force of a falling boulder.
The ancient floor timbers splintered and bowed under the crushing impact.
Lu Chen right away dropped his right knee onto the creature’s chest bone, pinning eight hundred pounds of thrashing muscle beneath his full weight.
The Mother Fox shrieked, its clawed hind legs raking wildly against the air, tearing deep gouges into the roof timbers pinned beneath it.
Its waxy woman’s face twisted into an expression of unholy, wild pleading.
“Master... Spare this concubine...” a frail, human voice cried from its throat.
“A hundred years of training... I can serve your bed... I can grant you gold...”
Lu Chen looked down into its weeping, frost-rimmed eyes.
His expression was as cold and detached as a coroner examining a three-day-old floater pulled from the river.
“Flesh rots,” Lu Chen said.
“Debts clear.”
He raised the Calamity Cleaver with both hands, muscles cording across his back like iron cables.
The molten veins on the iron spine pulsed in blinding crimson rhythm with his sixty-five-degree heart.
He reversed the grip, pointing the heavy, wedge-shaped tip straight down.
Then, with two thousand pounds of explosive downward torque, Lu Chen drove the cleaver down.
THWACK-CRUNCH!
The white-hot blade punched straight through the center of the fine china concubine mask.
It shattered the underlying vulpine skull like brittle clay, severing the lower brain, driving through the neck bones, and burying itself four inches deep into the solid granite foundation stones beneath the oak floorboards.
The Mother Fox’s body stiffened into a rigid, trembling arch.
A horrific geyser of black, boiling grease and foul-smelling gray steam erupted from the puncture wound around the blade.
The centenary frost covering its fur began to flash-boil. It hissed wildly as the creature’s internal Yin pool collapsed under the blade’s scorching heat.
Its leftover tails twitched, curled inward, and rapidly crumbled into heaps of greasy, charred ash.
After ten long breaths, the trembling stopped.
The beast lay fully still, its skull pinned to the bedrock by twelve pounds of smoking, blood-forged iron.
The amber tracking data box flickered once before Lu Chen’s eyes and faded into the cold mountain air.
Total silence dropped upon the Black Crow Post-Station.
Outside, the shrieking gale began to lose its demonic fury. It settled into a normal, bitter mountain snowstorm.
Inside the ruined common room, the surviving merchants, drivers, and guards slowly crawled out from beneath overturned carts, flour barrels, and heavy wooden tables.
Not a single man spoke.
Their breath caught in their throats as they looked toward the center of the hall.
Standing amidst the shattered timbers and rising steam was Lu Chen.
His upper torso was bare, covered in black soot, streaks of crimson blood, and dark charcoal veins that pulsed faintly under his slate-gray skin.
Steam rose in nonstop, billowing waves from his broad shoulders, wrapping him in an eerie, vaporous shroud.
At his feet lay the carcass of the centenary terror that had haunted the Old Crow Pass for fifty years, its head nailed to the stone floor by a smoking blade.
The escort captain was the first to move.
He dropped his poleaxe, fell to his knees in the slush. Then he pressed his forehead against the floorboards with a trembling shudder.
“Asura...” the captain whispered, his voice cracking with respectful terror.
“The Iron Asura has dropped...”
Behind him, Station Master Han and the thirty-odd merchants dropped to their knees as well.
They knocked their foreheads repeatedly against the cold wood. They muttered desperate prayers and pleas for mercy, treating the solitary dead-house apprentice not as a mortal martial artist. But as a wrathful demon-god walked out from the netherworld.
Lu Chen ignored them.
Worship didn’t fuel a fire.
He reached up, gripped the handle of the Calamity Cleaver. Then he wrenched the blade free from the granite with a sharp, grinding scrape.
He wiped the blade clean against a torn scrap of horse blanket. Then he slid the weapon back into the leather loop at his belt.
Then, Lu Chen walked over to the nearest overturned provisions barrel.
He picked up a slab of salted sheep fat the size of a roof tile, brushed away the dirt. Then he began to chew.
The cold fat slid down his gullet, fueling the embers in his chest and stabilizing his raised blood heat.
Gray dawn finally began to seep through the collapsed roof. Then, a new sound drifted down from the upper mountain road.
It wasn’t the howl of beasts.
It was the heavy, rhythmic grinding of iron-rimmed carriage wheels cutting through deep snow.
Beneath the creak of timber, the heavy clanking of massive iron chains echoed through the mountain gorge. It was slow, deliberate, and unnervingly heavy.