Prince Rui. The name hung in the freezing air like a slab of butcher’s animal fat.
Even the howling wind sweeping through the broken palisades seemed to drop to a dead murmur.
In the Great Yong Dynasty, Prince Rui was the Emperor’s ninth brother. The Prince of Ninghe, commander of the Imperial Gilded Guard, and the richest grandee in the western provinces.
To commoners, he was a living sovereign who wore five-clawed dragon robes stitched with river pearls.
To the royal soldiers standing in the snow, he was a nightmare wrapped in ten thousand pounds of iron.
“Prince Rui died in the capital,” Lu Chen said, his tone matter-of-fact.
“Official gazettes announced his passing in the eighth lunar month.”
“They declared seventy days of royal mourning.”
Tie let out a dry, hacking cough, spitting a mouthful of bloody thick spit onto the frozen mud.
“Official gazettes are written to keep the rabble from setting fire to the judge courts,” Tie sneered.
“The Prince didn’t die of consumption.”
“He died on an iron running table in the depths of the Imperial Alchemy Pavilion.”
Tie glanced sideways at his thirty guards.
The soldiers had already lowered their crossbows. They stood in rigid, scared silence around the groaning wagon.
Every man among them knew that speaking these words was treason punishable by slow dismemberment.
Yet with the cold-iron coffin knocking at their backs, the royal law felt ten thousand leagues away.
“The Prince was sixty-two years old,” Tie said, his voice dropping into a raspy whisper. “His lungs were turning to black coal, and his kidneys were failing.”
“He had spent thirty thousand coins of gold on mountain ginseng and immortal elixir pills, but mortal flesh rots no matter how much gold you feed it.”
“He was scared of the dark.”
Lu Chen leaned his ox-bone cleaver against his knee, listening with clean, steady care.
“So he sought a corpse-graft,” Lu Chen said.
Tie’s scarred jaw tightened.
“You know of the forbidden crafts?”
“I know dead meat,” Lu Chen said.
“Dead meat that moves is always grafted with something that never had a human mother.”
Tie nodded slowly, his eyes hollow with haunted memory.
“The court alchemists excavated a tomb from the Great Shang era beneath the northern salt marshes,” Tie whispered.
“They unearthed the mummified torso of an Eight-Arm Asura Corpse-Lord—a pre-dynastic disaster sealed in red stone jade.”
“The alchemists told Prince Rui that if they excised his rotting organs and grafted the Asura’s heart and backup shoulder tendons into his chest, he would gain three hundred years of unaging marrow.”
Lu Chen’s mind processed the body sickness with cold, clockwork speed.
The tracking data glyphs pulsed behind his eyes.
Human spirit veins were delicate blood-vessel channels designed for the gentle cycling of mortal breath.
Grafting the heart of an ancient Uncanny horror into a mortal ribs was akin to piping molten fiery melted rock waste into dry bamboo tubes.
“His heart burst,” Lu Chen diagnosed.
“It burst on the third day of surgery,” Tie admitted, shuddering. “The Prince died screaming in agony.”
“His skin turned the color of rusted bronze before the physicians could sew his chest bone shut.”
“They buried him in the old family tomb hall with full royal honors.”
Tie pointed a trembling, burned finger at the nine-foot iron coffin.
“Then, seven nights after the entombment, the palace guards heard screaming from beneath thirty feet of sealed stone.”
“The tomb was unsealed in secret.”
“Prince Rui was no longer dead.”
“The Asura heart had rooted into his corpse, feeding on the royal blood and rotting tissue.”
“Four extra arms had erupted from his broad back muscles. His fingernails had hardened into nine-inch iron daggers.”
“When the eight palace guards opened the stone sarcophagus, the Prince tore their throats out and ate their livers before the alchemists could drop the iron cage over him.”
Lu Chen looked at the leftover six chains wrapped around the coffin.
Beneath the black rime, the iron links were shaking with a nonstop, low-hum.
“The Emperor couldn’t execute him,” Lu Chen said.
“Execute what?” Tie replied with bitter sarcasm. “A dragon-blooded prince who eats human viscera?”
“If the country governors discovered that the royal bloodline had turned into Uncanny ghouls, the southern clans would rise in open rebellion by morning.”
“The Privy Council ordered the body cast into this ten-thousand-pound iron box, bound with seven cold-iron chains.”
“We were ordered to escort the coffin through the Black Mountain Range to the underground spirit array beneath the Western Castle.”
“There, the royal masters will use three thousand fire-slaves to refine the corpse into a living martial weapon.”
Tie paused, looking directly into Lu Chen’s unblinking eyes.
“We have traveled four hundred leagues,” Tie said. “Twenty-two men have died along the road from rotting frostbite and spectral nightmares.”
“And now, the chains are breaking.”
From inside the coffin, another dull impact echoed: THUD.
The hardwood wagon frame shivered, sending a shower of black ice needles flying into the snow.
The entity inside was growing stronger with every passing hour, nourished by the freezing mountain air and the death of the centenary fox in the courtyard.
Commander Tie dropped to one knee, looking up at Lu Chen.
The royal commander’s arrogance was entirely gone, replaced by the naked survival instinct of a desperate soldier.
“Lu Chen,” Tie pleaded, his voice cracking. “I’ll not conscript you.”
“I offer you an official escort contract.”
“Five hundred coins of royal treasury silver, and an official pardon bearing the red vermilion seal.”
“Help me escort this wagon over Dead Man’s Ridge to the Western Garrison.”
Lu Chen looked down at the kneeling officer.
His heart rate remained steady at fifty beats per minute, the Asura Crucible humming quietly inside his chest.
Five hundred coins of silver were meaningless to him.
Royal pardons were scraps of paper in an empire whose bones were already rotting away.
What mattered were the three thousand units of packed ancient malice locked behind that cast-iron lid.
That malice was the spark he needed to forge his bones into molten bronze.
Yet Lu Chen was not a suicidal fool.
He had measured the crushing force of those impacts.
Eighteen thousand Newtons per blow.
In an enclosed space, an eight-armed horror with bronze skin and rotting venom would tear thirty men to ribbons in seconds.
“I don’t work for the Great Yong Dynasty,” Lu Chen said, his voice flat and unmoving.
“I take no silver.”
“I take no pardons.”
Tie looked up, despair flashing across his scarred face. “Then you leave us to die?”
“I’m crossing the mountain,” Lu Chen said.
“There’s only one path to Gu Ning Country City: the high shelf over Dead Man’s Ridge.”
“I’ll walk the same road.”
“If the wagon rolls, it rolls. If the coffin breaks, my cleaver will speak for its own skin.”
Tie exhaled a long, shuddering breath.
He scrambled back to his feet, grimly clasping his burned hand with his right.
“That’s enough,” Tie rasped. “Just stay within sight of the column.”
“If you need animal fat or dried meat from our baggage train, take whatever you can carry.”
Lu Chen offered no reply.
He turned toward the station stable, gathered three bricks of salted mutton fat from the royal supply sacks. Then he packed them into his canvas bag.
He took his skin water gourd, filled it with boiling stone water from the kitchen kettle. Then he strapped it to his waist.
One hour later, the convoy rolled out of the shattered gates of Black Crow Station.
The morning sky had darkened from dull copper into a heavy, bruise-colored gray.
A howling northern gale swept through the mountain canyon. It drove pelting pellets of frozen sleet against the soldiers’ iron helmets.
The four-wheeled, iron-bound freight wagon groaned in agony as the six heavy draft oxen strained against their trace-chains, beginning the steep ascent onto the narrow stone shelf.
To the left rose sheer, jagged limestone cliffs that disappeared into the freezing cloud cover.
To the right plunged a two-thousand-foot upright deep pit, its jagged depths choked with mist and jagged shale needles.
Ahead of them lay the narrowest, deadliest stretch of the entire Black Mountain crossing:
Dead Man’s Ridge.
The trail here was barely eight paces wide, carved into the sheer rock face by convict laborers two hundred years before.
Under the weight of the ten-thousand-pound iron coffin, the frozen stone shelf beneath the wagon wheels began to groan.
Thin, hairline fractures spider-webbed across the snow-covered rock.
Inside the coffin, the scraping of iron fingernails grew louder, wild and starving.
Lu Chen walked twenty paces behind the rear wheels, his hand resting on the handle of his cleaver.
Steam vented steadily from his collar into the biting wind.
He looked down as hairline fissures spread along the edge of the cliff edge, stone dust trickling into the void.
“The stone is too brittle,” Lu Chen murmured to the wind.
Beneath ten thousand pounds of cold iron, the frozen shelf began to split.