Frozen limestone splintered along the rim of Dead Man’s Ridge under two tons of grinding mass.
Sub-zero mountain gales shrieked through the gorge, carrying sheets of crystal-clear sleet that hissed wildly against Lu Chen’s bare, smoking shoulders.
Locked against his chest was the Eight-Arm Asura Corpse-Lord.
Four of the monstrosity’s upper limbs hung in mangled shreds, snapped at the shoulders by the blood fury of the Calamity Cleaver.
Black rotting fluid bubbled from the ragged bronze stumps. It boiled into foul rotten-egg steam wherever it touched Lu Chen’s flesh.
Yet the creature’s lower four arms remained unbroken.
They were thick as temple pillars, plated in cold green-patinated bronze and corded with withered ghoul tendons.
Two clawed hands dug deep into the meat behind Lu Chen’s collarbones, their curved black talons grinding against the dense black glass melted rock waste that sealed his cracked ribs.
The other two bronze fists hammered into his flanks with the rhythmic, bone-crushing rhythm of high-pressure trip-hammers.
Each blow sent a dull blast wave through Lu Chen’s internal fire, rattling his organs like stones inside a bronze kettle.
A normal martial artist would have folded in half, their spine crushed within three breaths.
Lu Chen held his ground without yielding an inch.
His heels were dug three inches into the frozen mountain shale, his calves bunched like iron thick ship rope ropes.
His blood heat blazed at seventy-one degrees. He drove his boiling blood through blackened, hardened spirit veins at lethal speed.
The Corpse-Lord opened its jaw—a cavernous, out-of-joint maw lined with three nested rings of filed shark-like teeth—and roared.
The blast wave carried the stench of two hundred years of pickled royal rot, blowing Lu Chen’s dark hair straight back.
Below their boots, the narrow ledge surrendered.
A web of black fractures raced across the limestone shelf. The lip of the cliff edge snapped away into the howling deep pit.
Three thousand feet of empty mountain air opened beneath them.
The Corpse-Lord’s dead yellow eyes flared with primitive animal alarm.
Its leftover four talons bent instinctively, attempting to claw backward toward the solid rock of the cliff face to anchor its huge weight.
Lu Chen didn’t retreat.
He leaned forward into the void.
Shifting his balance point over the crumbling edge, Lu Chen hooked his left heel behind the monster’s bronze knee joint.
With a feral, deep-throated exhale of pure heat, he threw his entire eleven-stone frame against the nine-foot titan.
“Down,” Lu Chen whispered.
They plunged over the brink.
The mountain vanished from beneath their boots, replaced by the weightless terror of an upright drop.
Gale-force air shrieked in Lu Chen’s ears, ripping the breath from his nostrils and freezing his eyelashes into brittle needles.
All around them, jagged granite spires and frozen waterfalls blurred into a dizzying streak of white and slate-gray.
In the grip of gravity, the Corpse-Lord thrashed with wild, uncoordinated violence.
Its four bronze arms clawed at Lu Chen’s throat, trying to rip his windpipe out before they struck the earth.
Its heavy talons gouged deep crimson trenches across his chest, peeling back strips of scorched flesh.
Lu Chen ignored the agony.
His mind worked with clean, steady care, calculating flight path, wind pushback, and turning force.
If they hit the canyon floor with Lu Chen beneath, the monster’s nine-foot bronze bulk would pulverize his ribs into powdered bone.
He needed the monster to take the impact.
Clenching his jaw, Lu Chen drove his left elbow straight into the side of the Corpse-Lord’s withered bronze neck.
He used the pivot to wrench their locked bodies through a violent mid-air rotation.
The monster shrieked, its lower claws kicking against empty air as Lu Chen clamped his thighs around its armored waist like an iron vise.
He forced the creature beneath him. That turned its broad, nine-foot back toward the rapidly rising canyon floor.
Wind tore at his leather trousers and whipped the canvas travel sack against his spine.
Five hundred paces.
Three hundred paces.
One hundred paces.
The frozen canyon floor rushed upward—a savage graveyard of ancient limestone boulders, jagged scree, and five-foot sheets of river ice.
Lu Chen tucked his chin against his collarbone, braced his heels against the monster’s bronze pelvis. Then he held on with every ounce of tendon strength he possessed.
They hit.
The crash tore through the mountain gorge like an artillery shell exploding in an enclosed cave.
The Corpse-Lord’s massive back slammed directly into a three-ton granite monolith at end-post speed.
The monolith exploded.
Boulders shattered into a hail of jagged shrapnel that ricocheted off the surrounding canyon walls with ear-splitting cracks.
The river ice beneath the boulder buckled. It erupted in a violent geyser of crushed slush and black mountain silt.
A blast wave of tightly packed force blasted outward, stripping the frost from every pine tree within fifty paces.
Lu Chen felt the impact travel up through his legs like a lightning strike.
His thigh bone groaned beneath unbearable sideways tearing force.
The three cracked ribs on his left side, earlier glued by black glass melted rock waste, snapped with a muffled crunch.
A mouthful of scalding bright red blood welled up in his throat.
Lu Chen swallowed it back down, refusing to let the fire lose a single drop of fuel.
Beneath him, the Corpse-Lord took the total brunt of the fall.
Its thick green-bronze spine had snapped across the shattered boulder. It bent backward at an unnatural ninety-degree angle.
Its heavy bronze ribs caved inward like crushed armor plating, spraying dark, frozen ichor across the slush.
Yet the creature was not dead.
The Uncanny was not bound by mortal biology.
Even with its spine cut and its bronze shell crushed, the Corpse-Lord’s head whipped around, its jaws snapping toward Lu Chen’s throat.
Its two lower arms, though fractured, clawed wildly through the rubble, attempting to gouge out Lu Chen’s eyes.
“Still moving,” Lu Chen muttered between clenched teeth.
He planted his heavy iron-shod boot directly onto the creature’s shattered throat, pinning its thrashing skull against the bedrock.
With his right hand, Lu Chen reached behind his hip. Then he drew the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
The heavy blade hummed.
Coated in his seventy-degree bright red blood from the earlier clash, the notched iron spine glowed with a vicious, dull-crimson radiance.
Calamity Cleaver: Blood Forge.
The heat streaming from the blade melted the falling snowflakes inches before they touched the steel.
Beneath Lu Chen’s boot, the Corpse-Lord’s chest plate twitched.
Between the caved-in bronze ribs, a fist-sized lump of rusted metal pulsed with sickly green soft glow—the ancient bronze heart.
It was the vessel of Prince Rui’s grafted demonic soul, the spirit anchor holding this monster together.
The heart beat with a slow, wild pulse: thump... Thump... Thump...
The monster felt the impending execution.
Its two broken arms scratched desperately at Lu Chen’s calf, its jagged black fingernails splintering against his iron-hardened skin.
Lu Chen took a breath of freezing, sulfur-choked air.
He raised the twelve-pound cleaver with both hands, muscles across his back bunching into ridges of corded iron.
He brought the notched blade down with the full clockwork weight of his body.
The iron edge struck the center of the green bronze breastplate.
Sparks erupted in a brilliant golden fan.
The cleaver sliced through the buckled metal casing, snapped the withered tendons, and buried itself four inches deep into the bronze heart.
Lu Chen twisted the notched spine with brutal, measured torque.
Crack.
The bronze heart split in two.
An ear-splitting, inhuman shriek tore from the creature’s open maw. A psychic wail of two hundred years of bottled royal malice and torment.
A geyser of black, oily corpse-fluid erupted from the wound, drenching Lu Chen’s chest and arms.
The fluid hissed, evaporating into foul white steam as it met his scalding skin.
The thrashing limbs stiffened.
The green luster on the creature’s bronze scales faded rapidly. That turned into a dull, chalky gray like weathered tombstone slate.
Then the carcass went limp.
Lu Chen kept his boot firmly on the neck for ten slow breaths until the final tremor left the corpse.
In the center of his vision, pale crimson tracking data flickered into existence against the gray canyon mist.
Three thousand units.
The massive harvest settled into the spiritual hearth at the center of his chest. It roared like an oil fire fed by pure pitch.
Instantly, the psychic backlash hit.
The screaming phantom of Prince Rui, wrapped in rotting royal silk and surrounded by weeping court concubines, surged into Lu Chen’s mind.
Ugly demonic faces clawed at his eyeballs from behind his optic nerves.
The canyon walls seemed to tilt, twisting into a hall of bloody palace columns and gibbering court eunuchs.
Lu Chen’s left hand didn’t waver.
He reached smoothly into his left sleeve and drew out the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl.
He placed the pitted square point against the thick, leathery callous of his left palm.
Without blinking, he drove the awl downward, puncturing half an inch deep into the muscle.
Hot crimson blood welled around the iron shank.
The sharp, gut-deep sting of flesh and nerve flared through his brain, shattering the royal hallucinations like brittle ice under an iron boot.
The palace columns vanished.
The screaming concubines dissolved into mountain wind.
The canyon floor was still, silent, and real.
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked.” Lu Chen spoke the anchor quietly into the frost.
He pulled the iron awl from his palm, wiped the warm blood across his trousers. Then he slid the anchor back into his sleeve.
The kill was finished, and the crucible was charged to bursting.
Yet the bitter mountain draft was already leeching the heat from his skin. His cracked ribs groaned under the deepening cold.
He had minutes before the frost locked his spirit veins for good—the breakthrough had to start now.