Silence settled over Dead Man’s Ridge, heavier than the falling snow.
The wind carried the hot, copper stench of thirty butchered men. They mixed with the bitter reek of charred red stone and sulfuric grave salt water. Across the red-stained slate, small puddles of bright red blood were already turning slushy around the edges, forming thin scabs of purple ice.
The Eight-Armed Corpse-Lord stood atop the shattered timbers of the royal transport wagon.
Its green rust-crusted chest swelled and tightened with slow, clockwork rhythm. Each breath it drew expelled a plume of oily green mist that coated the nearby rocks in needle-sharp rime.
Thirty paces away, Lu Chen held perfectly still.
His eyes scanned the massacre site with the detached, cold and exact scrutiny of a dead-house coroner surveying a plague pit.
Thirty veteran soldiers removed in one hundred and eight seconds.
Average impact force: four thousand pounds per strike. Armor penetration: total against cold-rolled iron plate. Reaction speed: faster than a royal cavalry charge.
And now, swollen on Commander Tie’s third-tier Peak Bone-Forging blood, the monster possessed active regeneration.
In the corners of Lu Chen’s vision, faint hallucinations began to scratch at the edges of his sanity.
Whispers.
Cold, wet murmurs like stale water dripping into an underground water tank. The leftover mind of Prince Rui, warped by the royal court’s forbidden necromancy, echoed through the swirling snow:
Kneel before the Dragon Throne... Offer your marrow... The dynasty is eternal...
The malice streaming from thirty-four hundred units of unholy energy pressed against Lu Chen’s chest like an iron plate. His backup spirit veins—already hardened into brittle black glass melted rock waste from past breakthroughs—throbbed with sharp, needle-like spasms.
The sub-zero corpse frost was attempting to penetrate his marrow.
If the fire stalled here, his blood heat would crash. That triggered violent freezing shock within sixty seconds.
Lu Chen slowly reached into his left sleeve.
His fingers closed around the familiar, rough surface of his four-inch unpolished iron bone awl.
He pulled the tool into the dim light. The iron shank was cold, scarred by decades of scraping bone and animal fat in the Seventh Ward morgue.
Lu Chen pressed the square, hardened tip against the thick callous of his left palm.
Without a flicker of pause, his right hand drove the awl downward.
Squelch.
The iron point pierced half an inch through the dense scar tissue, sinking deep into the meat between his hand bones.
A sharp, electric jolt of pain shot straight up his forearm nerve and burst into his lower brain like white lightning.
The hallucinatory royal whispers shattered like brittle glass. The phantom cold pulled back from his skull.
Hot, dark-crimson blood welled up around the iron shank. It didn’t freeze. It sizzled against the bitter mountain air, dripping onto the gray slate below and melting small, smoking pits into the ice.
Lu Chen exhaled a steady plume of steam, his voice quiet, flat, and total:
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked.”
“Anchor checked.”
The reality seam locked tight.
He pulled the awl from his palm with a wet rasp, wiped the hot crimson blood against his trousers. Then he slid the iron spike back into his sleeve. The puncture wound in his palm didn’t need bandaging. The extreme internal heat of his blood was already searing the tiny blood vessel walls, clotting the wound into a black, iron-hard scab.
Next came the fuel.
In a normal climate, his resting body heat hovered at sixty-five degrees. But fighting a nine-foot Disaster streaming thirty degrees below zero needed maximum heat-powered burning.
His blood needed raw fuel. Heavy fats.
Lu Chen unslung his coarse canvas travel pack and placed it gently onto a flat dry boulder.
He unbuckled the leather straps and reached into the inside compartment, retrieving a clay pot jar sealed with pig bladder and beeswax. He peeled the seal away with his thumb.
Inside was thick, clarified animal fat. A rendered mixture of mountain sheep fat, pork lard, and stone salts, packed tight for long journeys through the northern wastes.
He took out a wide wooden bowl.
He used his marrow knife. He scooped two massive, greasy slabs of semi-solid white lard into the bowl. It weighed nearly two pounds.
To a normal mortal, eating two pounds of raw, salted fat would bring violent nausea and bile sickness.
To Lu Chen, it was coal for the kiln.
He brought the wooden bowl to his lips.
He drank.
The dense, salty grease slid down his throat in three heavy, deliberate gulps. It landed in his stomach like a brick of lead.
Two breaths passed.
Inside his gut, the stomach acids of the Molten Tiger Vajra Body engaged.
The dense animal fats broke down with terrifying speed. High-thickness heat energy flooded his bloodstream, rushing into his hardened melted rock waste-veins like lamp oil poured over glowing embers.
WHOOSH.
A dull, rhythmic roar echoed from inside Lu Chen’s ribs.
His blood heat surged. Sixty-five degrees. Sixty-seven degrees. Sixty-eight point five degrees.
The skin across his forearms and collarbone flushed deep bronze. The charcoal-black melted rock waste-veins beneath his flesh began to glow with a faint, cherry-red soft glow, visible even through the weave of his coarse linen shirt.
A dense cloud of scalding white steam erupted from his collar, his cuffs, and his nostrils.
The frost covering the limestone ledge within three paces of his boots dissolved into bubbling water, then evaporated into thin air with a violent hiss.
The tracking data dissolved.
Lu Chen reached behind his right shoulder and took hold of the handle of his weapon.
The twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver slid from its boiled-leather sheath with a dry, heavy rasp.
The weapon was brutal, ugly, and massive. Its spine was heavy with a slab of cold-rolled iron notched like a butcher’s saw. At the same time, its cutting edge was sharpened from the stone-hard thigh bone of an ancient wasteland ox.
Lu Chen raised his freshly punctured left hand.
He dragged the still-warm scab across the iron spine of the cleaver, smearing fresh bright red blood along the length of the notched teeth.
HISSSSS.
The blood met the iron and boiled instantly.
The demonic malice stored within the blade—the Fox-Demon bone-needle essence purified back at the post-station—ignited. A dark, crimson sheen wrapped around the bone edge, hardening into a semi-clear, glass-like layer of boiling blood-iron.
Disaster Cleaver: Blood Forge.
Across the clearing, the Eight-Armed Corpse-Lord sensed the change.
The Uncanny was drawn to heat like moths to an open kiln. In a mountain pass gripped by sub-zero death, Lu Chen’s streaming sixty-eight-degree fire was a blinding bright light of living Yang fire.
The creature’s eight bronze arms twitched.
Its twin golden pupils narrowed, the counter-rotating slits locking onto the glowing melted rock waste-veins tracing Lu Chen’s throat.
It let out a low, deep-throated growl that rattled the loose gravel on the cliff.
The creature stepped down from the broken wagon. Its taloned feet left cracked, frost-bitten gouges in the rock. Its eight arms spreading was wide in an encompassing ring of slaughter.
Lu Chen gave no ground.
He didn’t look for high ground. He didn’t look at the thirty mangled corpses of the royal escort.
He took a step forward.
His heated boot crunched down upon the blood-soaked snow.
Hiss.
The red slush boiled beneath his sole, turning to clean steam that swirled around his shins.
He took a second step.
The heavy twelve-pound cleaver rested casually in his right grip, the blood-forged edge pointing toward the frozen shale at a thirty-degree angle.
“Ten paces,” Lu Chen whispered to the falling snow.
The words were not a threat. They were a measurement.
The Corpse-Lord leaned forward, its eight massive arms flexing their grafted demon-tendons, preparing to unleash the same explosive charge that had shredded thirty men in two minutes.
Lu Chen closed his fingers around the worn leather wrap of his cleaver.
The mountain winds howled through Dead Man’s Ridge. It carried the smell of boiling fat, fresh blood, and ancient bronze.
Between mortal flesh and eternal horror, there was no middle ground.
Lu Chen took his third step forward, and the stone ridge shook.