Four hundred paces of sheer limestone rose toward the gray sky, sealing the mountain canyon in ice.
Sheets of blue river ice cascaded down the rock face like frozen curtains, slick, upright, and deadly.
Lu Chen stood at the base of the cliff edge, looking upward into the thinning mist.
His newly forged body was humming with quiet, unrushed life-force.
Fifty-two degrees.
The permanent heat streaming from his chest turned the air around his head into a shimmering haze of hot air.
He stepped toward the stone face, bent his knees, and drove his right hand forward.
His fingers, heavy by bronze marrow and hardened sinew, drove three inches into solid limestone.
He wasted no breath searching for ledges or natural crevices. He made his own.
With a rhythmic, explosive surge of leg power, he launched himself upward.
Ten paces in a single bound.
His left boot slammed into the frozen rock. It sent a deep metal chime—ting—through his shin and ankle that absorbed the shock instantly.
His fingers sank into the cliff face again, anchoring his eleven-stone frame without a tremor.
Bound after bound, he climbed the four-hundred-pace upright drop.
Loose shale and chunks of river ice clattered down into the empty canyon floor behind him.
In less than the time it took to boil a pot of coarse tea, Lu Chen hauled himself over the jagged lip of Dead Man’s Ridge.
He stepped back onto the mountain road.
The ridge was utterly lonely.
The howling blizzard that had raged through the night had subsided into a biting, cold mountain draft.
In the snowdrifts beside the cliff edge lay the wreckage of the royal escort.
The heavy armored wagon lay tilted on its side, its iron axles bent and its thick oak sideboards splintered into matchsticks.
The ten-thousand-pound iron coffin sat empty in the red slush, its seven massive retaining chains snapped like rotten hemp rope.
Scattered around the carriage were the corpses of Commander Tie and his thirty royal riders.
The mountain frost had already claimed them.
Their mail coats were white with rime. Their open, staring eyes were frozen into spheres of pale glass.
Beside the rear wheel, Commander Tie sat slumped against the iron hub.
His heavy saber was broken off four inches above the brass guard, his throat torn open by the Corpse-Lord’s talons.
Lu Chen walked past the frozen guards, his boots crunching in the blood-crusted snow.
He felt neither pity nor triumph.
In the borderlands of the Great Yong Dynasty, death was the only honest clerk.
He knelt beside the courier commander’s frozen body.
Tie had worn a heavy travel cloak fashioned from layered gray wolf pelts, lined with waterproof boiled oilskin.
Lu Chen unfastened the brass clasp and pulled the cloak free.
He swung it over his own broad shoulders.
The pelt fell past his knees, shielding his bare, scarred chest and black glass melted rock waste veins from the mountain wind.
The fifty-two-degree heat of his skin instantly warmed the frozen fur, releasing the faint musk of cured pine and leather.
Next to Tie’s belt hung a square iron token stamped with the royal courier seal. A coiled three-clawed dragon clutching an official judge seal.
Lu Chen unhooked the pass tablet and slipped it into his canvas travel sack.
An royal token from a dead commander was dangerous in country territory. But without travel papers, entry into a walled guard post city was impossible.
He checked the saddlebags of the frozen horses.
Most of the grain had been trampled into the slush, but in a waterproof leather pouch behind one saddle, he found two jars of coarse rock salt, three bricks of cured tea, and four pounds of smoked pork belly.
He stowed the provisions into his sack, took a swig of stinging sulfur liquor from an iron canteen, and stood.
He turned his back on the carnage of Dead Man’s Ridge and began the descent.
The northern path through the Old Crow Mountain Range wound steeply downward along the southern ridge.
As the height dropped, the oppressive, choking weight of the ghost-fog began to thin.
The frozen gray cliffs of limestone gave way to dark stands of weeping cypress and stunted mountain pines.
By noon, the narrow goat tracks of the pass widened into a packed-gravel military road.
Carriage ruts, frozen deep into the mud, showed that patrols and merchant trains had once moved through this hall before the Uncanny infestation closed the pass.
Three leagues further down, the gravel ended.
Lu Chen stepped onto the Great Southern Imperial Highway.
It was a building marvel from the height of the Great Yong Dynasty’s golden age.
Thirty paces wide, paved with massive blocks of dressed blue river granite, the highway cut through the mountain foothills like a giant stone serpent.
Every five leagues, a weathered granite way-marker stood by the roadside, carved with official mileage and the names of country capitals.
Many of the stone blocks were cracked, overgrown with coarse crabgrass and yellow mountain weeds.
Burned-out watchtowers and abandoned toll-posts dotted the road shoulders. It was silent testaments to the rotting power of the royal judge courts.
Yet the road was no longer empty.
As Lu Chen walked south, travelers began to appear.
Ragged columns of peasant refugees pushing wooden wheelbarrows loaded with bundles of straw and weeping children.
Armed merchant caravans with sixty carts, guarded by grim-faced hired blades carrying pole-arms and heavy crossbows.
A train of saffron-robed itinerant monks chanting funeral prayers, beating a hollow wooden fish to keep mountain specters away from their bread rations.
When Lu Chen walked past, the refugees pulled their barrows into the ditch.
The hired blades gripped the grips of their pole-arms, their knuckles white with tension.
They didn’t see a simple traveler.
They saw a tall, broad-shouldered man wrapped in a courier commander’s wolf-skin cloak, steam rising continuously from his collar into the chilly air.
At his hip swung a twelve-pound, notched ox-bone cleaver that smelled faintly of old blood and rusted bronze.
And beneath his leather trousers, every step he took against the granite highway produced a faint, rhythmic sound chime—dong... Ting...—like an iron statue walking upon the earth.
No one dared meet his gaze.
Lu Chen paid them no mind.
His focus was fixed on the southern horizon.
He climbed the gentle crest of the final foothill ridge. There, the mountain range broke open into the boundless southern river plain.
The clouds parted.
A pale, cold shaft of afternoon sunlight broke through the leaden haze, lighting up the world below.
Sprawling across the fertile basin where the rushing Dragon River met the southern plains was Gu Ning Country City.
The sight took the breath from the chest.
It wasn’t a mere city. It was an iron-and-stone giant beast resting upon the earth.
Its outer curtain walls, built from massive blocks of black dark rock, rose sixty feet into the air, stretching for twenty leagues across the valley floor.
Massive eight-sided gate pavilions, crowned with three-tiered roof edges of green glazed tile, overlooked the stone highway like watchful stone giant statues.
Along the low roof walls, heavy siege giant crossbows and bronze soul-scouring mirrors were mounted at fifty-pace intervals, their polished surfaces catching the sun.
Above the central gates, vast black-and-gold banners of the Great Yong Country Governor snapped in the brisk spring wind.
Outside the walls, a bustling sea of camps, timber yards, and river docks choked the approaches.
Hundreds of merchant barges with red sails crowded the riverbanks, loading grain, tea, and salt under the watchful spears of the Black Banner Garrison.
The status tracking data flickered once before Lu Chen’s eyes and faded into the horizon.
Gu Ning.
The political and martial heart of the northern provinces.
A metropolis housing two million souls, thirty martial sects, and the regional headquarters of the Royal Demon Hunting Bureau.
Yet beneath the bustling splendor of the city, Lu Chen’s senses detected something else.
He smelled it on the wind blowing from the black dark rock walls.
Beneath the aroma of roast pork, woodsmoke, and river water lay the cold, sweet stench of pickled corpse wax.
The faint, greasy chill of specters bound in silk robes.
The Uncanny didn’t merely haunt abandoned mountain passes and burning rural yamens.
Here, in the country capital, it sat in banquet halls, wore stitched official rank badges. Then he dined on the life-force of two million living mortals.
Lu Chen reached into his sleeve.
He touched the four-inch iron bone awl resting against his forearm. He felt its pitted, cold iron through his leather cuff.
His fingers moved to the worn cord wrapped around the handle of his twelve-pound cleaver.
Inside his chest and limbs, his bronze marrow pulsed with rhythmic, molten warmth.
Fifty-two degrees.
The Old Crow Pass was behind him.
Black Water County was reduced to ash and memories.
The wilderness was conquered.
Now began the true meat-grinder.
“Gu Ning,” Lu Chen said quietly.
Between the black dark rock castle walls and the thunder of the southern river water gates, two million mortals were feeding something ancient in silk robes.
He cinched the canvas strap across his collar, loosened the cleaver in its hemp wrap. Then he set his stride straight toward the outer gates.