Dawn broke over the limestone peaks of the Black Mountain Range like a dull copper coin.
Freezing mountain air swept through the shattered timber gates of Black Crow Station. He carried the bitter stench of charred animal fat and fox blood.
Lu Chen sat on an overturned oak rain barrel beneath the roof edges of the stable.
Around his boots, the three-foot snowdrifts had turned into a circle of black, steaming slush.
His body heat radiated outward in visible waves. That kept the outer edge within three paces fully free of ice.
He took a bite from a block of salted sheep fat.
The cold fat was dense as candle wax. But the moment it touched his tongue, his internal heat dissolved it into rich, burning grease.
He chewed step by step, swallowing the heat fuel down into his stomach.
Deep within his chest cavity, the Asura Crucible hummed like a low-hum bellows. That turned the animal fat into heat-powered pressure to lubricate his scorched vessels.
The tracking data glyphs dissolved back into his optic nerves.
Across his knuckles and forearms, the black glass lines of his melted rock waste veins pulsed with dull charcoal warmth.
The fight against the Centenary Yin-Fox hours before had burned up over four thousand kilocalories.
Without fresh animal fat and salt marrow, his internal fire would begin cannibalizing his own muscular tissue.
Across the courtyard, Station Master Han was wildly directing four surviving merchants with wooden shovels.
“Spread the burning lime powder!” Han shouted, his voice cracking from terror and cold. “Dump the salt into the well trough! If the blood scent drifts up into the high cliffs, the mountain ghouls will smell it before midday!”
The merchants moved like stumbling puppets, their faces gray, their hands shaking inside blood-spattered mittens.
None of them dared look at Lu Chen.
To these ordinary traders, the young man sitting in the melted snow with steam venting from his linen collar was far more terrifying than the eight-tailed beasts he had butchered.
Lu Chen wiped grease from his chin with the back of his thumb.
He rested his right hand against the coarse hemp-wrapped handle of his twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
The blade leaned against the timber barrel beside him.
Following the midnight synthesis of the Calamity Cleaver, the iron spine of the weapon had absorbed dark crimson veins that faintly looked like crystal-hardened bone marrow.
Suddenly, the shale beneath his boots shuddered.
It wasn’t the high, whistling shaking of a mountain gust.
It was a deep, rhythmic ground-shock, traveling through thirty feet of frozen granite.
Lu Chen lifted his chin.
Down the narrow mountain pass to the east. There, the road wound toward the royal highway, the morning fog began to churn.
The heavy, metal rhythm of iron-shod hooves hammered against the rock.
“Hooves,” Lu Chen murmured.
Station Master Han froze, his shovel dropping into the mud with a wet slap.
“Bandits?” one of the merchants squeaked, backing toward the charred bunkhouse. “The Black Mountain outlaws?”
“No,” Lu Chen said. “Too heavy.”
Eight massive draft warhorses emerged from the pine mist, their breath billowing in violent plumes of frost.
Each beast was armored in boiled black leather and steel brow plates, their iron shoes spiked for gripping dangerous mountain ice.
They strained forward in pairs, thick leather harness traces groaning under staggering tension.
Behind them rolled a heavy freight wagon of giant proportions.
Its bed was framed with black hardwood beams as thick as a grown man’s torso, heavy with cold-forged iron plates riveted every three inches.
The wagon possessed six broad iron wheels.
Every revolution of those wheels ground the shale road into gray powder, carving ruts six inches deep into the frozen dirt.
“Ten thousand pounds,” Lu Chen judged quietly. His eyes tracked the torque on the wagon’s heavy axles.
Resting atop the timber bed was a single, massive stone iron coffin.
It measured nine feet in length and four feet across, cast from pitted, unpolished cold iron.
The metal was not gray like common iron. It was the dead, light-absorbing black of deep-vein melted rock waste.
Seven huge cold-iron chains wrapped around the coffin’s girth, each single link forged as thick as a blacksmith’s forearm.
The chains were bolted directly through the heavy wagon chassis and secured with massive copper warding padlocks.
Pasted across the seam of the coffin lid were dozens of long parchment magic charms.
The yellow paper was stained with red stone ink, flapping wildly in the mountain wind like dying moths.
Yet the wind was not what made the magic charms flutter.
A visible shimmer of gray frost radiated outward from the iron surface, freezing the air into falling needles of rime.
Escorting the wagon were thirty mounted soldiers clad in black mountain-pattern scale armor.
They rode with rigid discipline, their faces hidden behind blackened iron half-masks.
Each man carried a cocked repeating crossbow across his saddle bow and a six-foot armor-piercing glaive slotted into a leather boot.
They didn’t look like local guard post conscripts.
Their stance, their weathered leather grips. The cold deadness in their visible eyes belonged to elite royal killers.
At the head of the column rode a man on a towering gray stallion.
He wore an officer’s heavy iron layered-scale coat with pauldrons shaped like roaring horned beasts.
A broad, notched headsman’s saber hung at his left hip.
His left cheek was carved by a pale scar that ran from his earlobe down into his beard. He pulled his mouth into a permanent, hungry sneer.
He raised a steel-gauntleted fist.
“Halt,” the commander barked.
His voice was like two millstones grinding together.
The thirty riders pulled up in perfect all at once, their horses stamping the mud and snorting white fog.
The massive wagon groaned to a standstill fifty paces from the station gate.
Even at that distance, the surrounding heat in the courtyard plummeted by five degrees.
The frost crawling along the wagon’s timber frame didn’t melt in the morning light. It thickened, coating the iron chains in a crust of crystal-clear black frost.
Station Master Han stumbled forward, his knees shaking so wildly that he nearly fell into the mud.
He dropped to both knees ten paces from the officer’s horse, pressing his forehead into the slush.
“Hum-humble Station Master Han... Greets the Royal Vanguard!” Han stammered, his teeth chattering against each other. “We... We were besieged by mountain fiends last night! We have no hot tea ready—”
The officer didn’t look down at the kneeling clerk.
His narrowed eyes swept across the courtyard.
He observed the crushed wooden wall logs, the heaps of charred, skinless corpses, and the black blood soaking into the snowdrifts.
His gaze stopped on Lu Chen.
Lu Chen stayed on the oak barrel.
He continued chewing his sheep fat, his gray linen tunic open at the throat. He showed the dense corded muscle of his neck and collarbone.
A gentle column of steam rose from Lu Chen’s bare chest, dissolving into the freezing sky.
The officer’s eyes locked onto the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver resting beside Lu Chen’s hip.
Then his gaze shifted downward to the melted circle of earth around Lu Chen’s boots.
The officer’s scarred lip twitched.
“Iron Yang blood fire,” the officer said aloud, his voice flat and assessing. “Peak Flesh Tempering. Half a step into the marrow.”
Lu Chen finished swallowing the animal fat.
He wiped his fingers on a rag.
“You’re blocking the road,” Lu Chen said.
The thirty royal guards stiffened, their hands shifting instinctively toward the triggers of their repeating crossbows.
The officer didn’t signal them to fire.
He swung his right leg over the saddle and dismounted, his heavy iron boots hitting the frozen dirt with an authoritative crunch.
He stood six feet two inches tall, broad-shouldered and thick-necked like an old mountain bear.
He rested his gauntleted hand on the handle knob of his headsman’s saber and walked past the trembling station master.
He stopped five paces from Lu Chen, right at the boundary where the snow turned into melted slush.
The commander looked down at the slush. He felt the abnormal heat rising against the leather of his shin guards.
“I’m Tie Shanhe,” the commander said, his voice dropping into a low rasp. “Imperial Escort Commander of the Third Black Banner.”
Lu Chen didn’t stand.
“Lu Chen,” he replied.
“You killed the centenary fox,” Commander Tie said. He gestured with his chin toward the cut skull lying near the well.
“It broke the gate,” Lu Chen said.
Tie chuckled, a dry, rattling sound without humor.
“A wild martial artist who cooks his own marrow to fifty degrees in the dead of winter,” Tie said. “A rare piece of steel.”
He reached inside the breastplate of his scale armor. Then he pulled out a rolled scroll of stiff crimson parchment bound with yellow silk cord.
A heavy wax seal stamped with the coiled dragon of the Great Yong Ministry of War gleamed against the parchment.
“The heavens have delivered you at the right hour,” Tie said. He held the crimson scroll toward Lu Chen.
Lu Chen looked at the scroll, his expression fully blank.
“What’s that?” Lu Chen asked.
“An Royal Conscription Draft,” Commander Tie said. “By order of the Grand Clerk hall and the Council of State.”
“From this breath onward, you’re drafted into the Imperial Escort Detail.”
Tie pointed his iron thumb back toward the ten-thousand-pound black iron coffin.
“You’ll carry steel for my vanguard over Dead Man’s Ridge.”
Lu Chen looked past the commander’s shoulder. He stared at the seven cold-iron chains wrapping the massive coffin.
Beneath the yellow paper magic charms, the black iron seemed to absorb the dawn light, darker than a grave.
Lu Chen picked up his notched ox-bone cleaver and laid it across his knees.
“No,” Lu Chen said.