Shattered ice and powdered stone carpeted the canyon floor in a frozen graveyard.
Steam drifted lazily from the crushed carcass of the Corpse-Lord. He carried the sour, vinegar reek of pickled royal flesh into the freezing mountain draft.
Lu Chen leaned against the splintered face of the granite monolith, his breathing slow and ragged.
The violent rush of combat was draining away, leaving behind a hollow, freezing ache.
His blood heat was dropping fast.
From seventy-one degrees during the plunge, it had plummeted to forty-three within twenty breaths.
The living cost of his fire was coming due.
A violent shiver racked his spine, and the dark melted rock waste-veins along his collarbone pulsed with dull, throbbing stiffness.
Without nonstop fuel, the hearth would stall. The sub-zero frost of the canyon would seize his hardened spirit veins like brittle glass.
He kept his hands steady, dropped his canvas sack onto a flat slab of limestone. Then he pulled the drawstring open.
Inside lay three dense cakes of salted sheep fat and a thick strip of cured horse lard.
Lu Chen picked up the first cake.
The animal fat was cold and greasy, smelling of dried salt and raw mutton fat.
He bit off a thick chunk, grinding the waxy mass between his back teeth and forcing it down his throat without chewing it fine.
He scooped up a handful of clean snow from a nearby drift, shoving it into his mouth to wash the grease down.
As the dense fat hit his stomach, the internal embers flared.
The heat influx steadied his pulse.
The shivering subsided, replaced by the steady, clockwork rumble of body-energy digestion.
Lu Chen wiped the lard from his lips with the back of his calloused wrist.
“Stable,” he murmured.
He sat cross-legged on the frozen stone, his legs locking into a rigid lotus stance.
In his chest, the Asura Crucible hummed.
Three thousand units of purified malice spun in the spiritual hearth. It glowed with a deep, fiery crimson that lit up the inside of his ribs.
It was the largest harvest of his life.
The full spiritual marrow of Prince Rui—condensed over two hundred years of forbidden embalming rituals and royal slaughter.
There was no reason to wait.
In the Great Yong Dynasty, a half-step fighter was merely an appetizer for roaming specters.
Only true Bone Forging could turn mortal meat into something the Uncanny couldn’t digest.
Lu Chen closed his eyes and focused his intent on the center of the crucible.
Ignite.
The three thousand units of malice blew up at once.
It wasn’t a gentle stream of energy. It was a flash flood of molten melted rock waste poured straight into an empty barrel.
A sound like an iron foundry roaring to life echoed inside his chest.
Lu Chen’s jaw clamped shut so hard his teeth groaned under the shear pressure.
The heat was instant and total.
His internal heat spiked past sixty degrees, tore through seventy. Then he rocketed toward ninety in three rapid heartbeats.
His vision went fully white.
The nerve recoil—the phantom agony syndrome—struck his lower brain like a sledgehammer.
Every nerve ending along his spine felt as though it were being peeled open with a dull dead-house razor knife and dipped in boiling pitch.
His backup spirit veins, already scorched and fragile, hardened wildly. That turned into thick cables of black glass melted rock waste that bound his ribs in a rigid cage.
Yet the crucible didn’t stop at the flesh.
The furious tide of crimson Yang-fire drove deeper, bypassing muscle wrapping, passing through the outer bone layer, and slamming directly into the core of his bones.
Mortal bone marrow was soft.
It was fragile, fatty, cellular mush designed to produce fragile mortal blood.
Against the ninety-degree fury of the Asura Crucible, that mortal marrow didn’t stand a chance.
It boiled.
In his femurs, his hips, his spine, and his skull, the ancient marrow burned up in a blinding flash of cellular burning.
The agony was unlike anything Lu Chen had ever endured.
It wasn’t the tearing of skin or the fracture of bone. It was the hollow, screaming void of his entire skeleton being hollowed out by fire.
Cold sweat poured from his brow, vaporizing into white steam the instant it hit the air.
Veins bulged along his neck like twisting black vipers.
Lu Chen didn’t scream.
He dug his fingernails into his knees, his knuckles turning white, and held the stance unmoving.
In the hollowed cavities of his skeleton, the purified malice began to transform.
The Asura Crucible forged the raw malice, stripping away the rotting curses of Prince Rui and condensing the spiritual essence into a dense, metal liquid.
It had the heavy, gleaming luster of molten bronze.
The liquid bronze surged into the hollowed marrow canals of his bones.
It filled his thick thigh bone shafts.
It flooded the twenty-four spine bones of his spine.
It coated the inner vault of his skull, the curves of his collar bones, and the slender bones of his fingers.
Wherever the molten bronze touched, it seeped into the porous calcium lattice of the bone walls, fusing with the stone matrix on a tiny level.
Then, the deep ring began.
Clang.
A deep, metal note chimed from deep inside Lu Chen’s right thigh.
It sounded like a heavy bronze bell struck in an ancient mountain abbey, muffled beneath layers of earth.
The shaking traveled up his pelvis.
Clang... Chime...
His hips chimed in answer.
Then, the sound wave hit his spine.
From the sacrum to the base of his skull, the twenty-four spine bones began to ring in climbing colorful row.
Dong... Clang... Chime... Dong...
The sound was not imaginary.
It was a sound blast wave shaking outward through his muscle wall, streaming into the cold air of the gorge.
The air around Lu Chen began to hum with a pure, metal hum.
Pebbles on the limestone slab rattled and danced.
Sheets of frost on the nearby boulders cracked and fell away, crushed by the sheer sound deep ring of his skeleton.
With every strike of his heart, his bones chimed like iron bells.
The sound was clean, cold, and iron-hard.
The molten bronze marrow cooled slightly, settling from boiling liquid into a dense, semi-thick, sticky metal core that pulsed in perfect harmony with his blood fire.
The black glass melted rock waste veins that lined his torso reached down. Their glass-like roots anchored directly into the newly forged bronze bone surface.
Flesh, melted rock waste, and bronze became one unified machine.
The blinding white light in his vision faded back into the dim gray reality of the gorge.
Lu Chen opened his eyes.
A heavy breath of scalding steam rolled from his parted lips, warming the freezing air for five paces ahead.
The painful fever had broken.
His internal heat didn’t drop back to forty degrees.
It settled firmly, permanently, at fifty-two point zero degrees.
In the center of his sight, the crimson status box locked into place.
True Bone Forging.
Molten Bone Marrow.
Lu Chen slowly uncrossed his legs and stood up.
There was no stiffness in his knees.
No lingering ache in his fractured ribs.
The three snapped bones that had threatened his lung had been fully re-forged from within. Their cracked calcium shells bound together by solid bronze marrow and heavy with bands of black glass melted rock waste.
He tapped his left knuckles against his right forearm.
Ting.
A clear, ringing bell chime echoed across the canyon floor, as if he had tapped a bronze temple vessel.
The skin yielded like tough leather, but the bone beneath was unbending as cast iron.
He looked down at his boots.
Where his soles touched the frozen river ice, the ice didn’t crack. It melted right away, turning into bubbling, clear water that hissed into steam against the sub-zero shale.
The howling blizzard wind blew through the canyon, carrying flakes of crystal-clear ice against his chest.
The ice vanished six inches before touching his skin, turned straight into ash into air by the fifty-two-degree heat streaming from his core.
He felt no cold.
The mountain blizzard that had frozen thirty royal riders to death in their saddles was now nothing more than a mild, refreshing breeze against his neck.
Lu Chen picked up the leftover half-cake of animal fat, placed it in his canvas sack. Then he pulled the cord tight.
He bent down and took the twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver by the handle.
When his fingers closed around the iron, a faint ringing hum passed between the blade and his bronze forearm bones.
The weapon felt lighter now.
Not because the steel had changed, but because the torque delivered by his re-forged skeletal frame had doubled.
He could swing this twelve-pound slab of iron all day without tearing a single tendon.
Lu Chen looked toward the eastern wall of the canyon.
The sheer cliff face rose four hundred paces into the gray morning mist, draped in slick curtains of upright river ice.
There was neither path nor crevice leading out of the deep pit.
“Four hundred paces,” Lu Chen said softly.
He strapped the notched cleaver to his belt, bent his bronze-jacketed fingers, and stepped straight toward the frozen rock face.