Silence fell over the courtyard of Black Crow Station, icy and choking.
Only the cold wind hissed through the splintered gaps of the timber wooden wall. It lifted flakes of gray ash into the pale morning sky.
Commander Tie stood motionless, the crimson conscription scroll held out in his steel-clad fist.
The scar running down his cheek turned a mottled, furious purple.
“No?” Tie repeated softly.
His voice was dangerously quiet, like a blade slowly sliding from a wooden sword sheath.
Behind him, thirty royal horsemen shifted in their stirrups with clean, steady care.
Thirty steel bowstrings clicked back into their brass latches.
Thirty repeating crossbows rose, their dark iron sights locking onto Lu Chen’s throat, chest, and knees.
Station Master Han let out a strangled whimper from the mud.
He crawled three feet forward on his elbows, slapping his palms against the slush toward Lu Chen.
“Young hero! Master Lu!” Han cried, tears carving clean lines through the soot on his cheeks. “Don’t invite ruin! That’s the seal of the Council of State! Refusing a royal levy is rebellion against the throne!”
“Your family will be flayed! Your ancestors’ graves will be plowed with salt!”
Lu Chen’s eyes never left Tie.
He remained seated on the overturned barrel, his thumbs resting quietly against the ox-bone cleaver’s spine.
“I have no family,” Lu Chen said.
“And I don’t dig graves for dead emperors.”
Commander Tie’s eyes narrowed into two slits of cold, murderous iron.
“In the Great Yong Dynasty, every grain of rice, every inch of dirt, and every drop of blood in your veins belongs to the Son of Heaven,” Tie said.
“A wild dog with a hot fire thinks he can bark at an Imperial Banner?”
Tie took one heavy stride forward.
His iron shin guards splashed through the rim of melted slush, his weight sinking into the blackened mud.
“I have carried out seventy deserters between the capital and these mountains,” Tie growled. His voice dropped into a deep-throated rumble.
“Ten were Bone Forging experts who thought their marrow was too hard for royal steel.”
“Their skulls are drying on spikes outside the South Gate.”
Lu Chen looked up at Tie’s face.
His vision pulsed with cold clarity.
The tracking data flickered away.
Tie possessed authentic Bone Forging training. But it was rigid, stiffened by military drills and compromised by old chest scar tissue.
His right shoulder dipped slightly by two inches, betraying an old spear wound through the collar bone.
“You have a bad shoulder,” Lu Chen said.
Tie’s jaw locked.
Without another word of warning, the commander’s left hand shot out like an iron vice.
It was the Eagle Talon Grapple of the Royal Vanguard.
His steel gauntlet tore through the air with a sharp sonic whistle, fingers hooked into a claw designed to snap collarbones and crush windpipes in a single spinning twist.
Over four thousand Newtons of clamping force dropped toward Lu Chen’s throat.
Lu Chen left the cleaver on his knees.
He simply raised his left arm, his forearm snapping upward in a tight forty-five-degree wedge.
CLANG!
The impact rang like a sledgehammer striking an anvil.
Tie’s steel-plated fingers clamped directly onto Lu Chen’s bare forearm.
The shock drove the oak barrel beneath Lu Chen two inches deeper into the frozen earth.
Yet Lu Chen’s arm didn’t yield.
His outward and forearm bone bones, hardened by two breakthroughs of the Molten Tiger Vajra Body, absorbed the blunt sideways tearing force without a tremor.
Tie’s eyes widened in genuine disbelief.
He had expected the young man’s arm to shatter like dry pine kindling.
Instead, his fingers felt as though they had locked around a solid metal bar of cold-rolled pig iron.
“Take your hand back,” Lu Chen said.
“Insolent cur!” Tie roared, his facial scar flushing crimson.
The commander channeled his internal Qi, his forearm muscles bulging beneath his layered-scale sleeves as he tried to twist Lu Chen’s arm out of its socket.
Lu Chen’s left palm opened.
Inside his chest cavity, the Asura Crucible roared to life.
The four hundred grams of sheep fat he had burned up minutes earlier ignited into high-octane body-energy heat.
His blood pressure spiked.
The charcoal-black melted rock waste veins running across his forearm flashed with a dull orange glow beneath his skin.
His blood heat spiked from forty-one degrees straight to sixty-five.
HISSSSSSS!
A cloud of boiling white steam blasted from the seams of Lu Chen’s sleeve.
The intense heat surge conducted instantly through the cold steel plates of Tie’s gauntlet.
The oil lubricating the said clearlyjoints boiled in half a second, smoking and sizzling with the sharp reek of scorched petroleum.
Beneath the steel, the boiled leather inner lining of the gauntlet charred to blackened carbon.
The smell of roasting human flesh filled the air between them.
“Aaargh!”
Tie let out a deep-throated gasp, his face twisting in sudden agony.
He yanked his arm back with all his might, stumbling three paces backward into the slush.
His boots skidded in the mud before he caught his balance, his heavy saber clattering against his thigh.
Tie ripped off his smoking gauntlet with his right hand and threw it to the ground.
The leather lining was melted, fused into a crisp black shell.
The skin across his palm and fingers was blistered into hideous white welts, weeping clear fluid from third-degree contact burns.
Behind him, the thirty royal horsemen raised their crossbows all at once, their iron triggers tightening.
“Commander!” the vanguard sergeant barked. “Loose!”
“Hold!” Tie bellowed, his voice ragged with pain and fury.
“Hold your fire!”
The soldiers froze, their crossbows trembling as they kept their sights trained on Lu Chen.
Lu Chen slowly stood up from the barrel.
He stood six feet one inch tall, lean and corded like seasoned mountain hickory.
His linen tunic hung open. He showed his chest where steam rose in thick white swirls from the charcoal-etched lines of his melted rock waste veins.
He reached down with his right hand, lifted the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver. Then he rested its notched spine against his shoulder.
His footsteps hissed against the frozen shale, vaporizing the frost into gray mist.
“You want an escort,” Lu Chen said, his voice flat, quiet, and fully empty of fear.
“I’m traveling west to Gu Ning Country City.”
“I walk alone.”
Tie stared at Lu Chen’s bare chest, his breath coming in ragged, steaming gasps.
The commander was a butcher who had survived three border rebellions and two country pacification campaigns.
He knew killers when he saw them.
The young man before him didn’t have the wild, uneven bravado of a sect student.
He had the cold, terrifying steadiness of a slaughterhouse master who looked at human bodies as meat, bone, and connective tissue.
A martial artist who could heat his own blood to the boiling point of water and withstand a four-thousand-Newton crush without cracking a tendon was not a conscript.
He was a walking siege weapon.
If thirty repeating crossbows fired right now, twenty iron quarrels might penetrate the young man’s flesh.
And before the leftover ten could reload, that twelve-pound cleaver would butcher Tie and ten of his best horsemen into chopped suet.
Tie clenched his blistered left hand into a fist, ignoring the searing pain of his scorched nerve endings.
“You have no fear of royal law,” Tie whispered, his teeth bared in a tight, grim grimace.
“Law doesn’t stop ghouls,” Lu Chen said.
“It won’t stop me.”
Station Master Han remained curled in the mud. He wept silently, praying that the mountain would open up and swallow the entire post-station whole.
Tie exhaled a long plume of gray breath.
He slowly slid the crimson conscription draft back into his breastplate, tucking it away.
“You’re heading to Gu Ning,” Tie said, his voice dropping into a hard, measured tone.
“The western highway through the valley is buried under forty feet of snow. The only path across the Black Mountain Range is the high shelf.”
“Dead Man’s Ridge.”
Lu Chen’s eyes didn’t waver.
“I know the road,” Lu Chen said.
“You don’t know what’s waiting on that ridge,” Tie spat. He gestured with his burned chin toward the giant freight wagon behind him.
“You think this iron coffin is tax silver? You think we’re hauling royal grain?”
Tie stepped aside, revealing the full dark shape of the ten-thousand-pound black iron box resting on the heavy wagon bed.
The seven cold-iron chains wrapped around its girth gleamed with an oily, unnatural frost.
The draft warhorses hitched to the wagon began to stamp their hooves nervously, their iron-plated heads tossing as they whinnied in low, scared distress.
“Whatever is inside,” Lu Chen said, “it’s dead.”
Tie let out a harsh, bitter bark of laughter that ended in a cough.
“Dead?” Tie muttered.
“I pray to every god in the nine heavens that it stays dead.”
Before Lu Chen could reply, the mountain wind suddenly died.
The fluttering of the yellow red stone paper magic charms ceased all at once, freezing stiff against the iron lid like varnished boards.
The surrounding heat dropped another ten degrees in the space of three heartbeats.
Breath turned to falling ice needles before it could clear a man’s lips.
Then, from the total center of the ten-thousand-pound iron coffin, a sound rang across the frozen yard.