Rain tasted of sulfur and horse dung.
Pei Jing opened his right eye first. The left was swollen shut, sealed by a crust of dried blood and gutter grease. Cold water dripped from rotten cedar roof edges, striking his bare neck in steady intervals. Each drop registered as a pinpoint of cold against skin scoured by river stones.
He didn’t groan. Groaning wasted oxygen and announced presence to whatever hunting beasts remained in the alley.
Instead, he lay motionless in the mud and conducted an inventory.
Fourteen years in corporate auditing had conditioned him to categorize deficits before attempting remediation. The environment came first: narrow alleyway, cobblestones slick with grease from an oil press, smell of rancid sesame mash and wet straw. Early autumn, judging by the chill in the drizzle.
Then came the physical vessel.
Left collar bone: fractured cleanly two inches from the acromioclavicular junction. The bone ends grated when his chest swelled beyond a shallow breath.
Ribs: third and fourth false ribs on the left side bruised deep down to the bone surface, likely cracked, but no puncture into the chest around the lungs. Breath smelled of copper, not lung foam.
Skull: jagged cut along the hairline, three inches long, clotting sluggishly. Vision in the right eye remained sharp, pupils tracking without nystagmus.
Musculature: severely half-starved. Chest muscles and thigh muscles were thin sheets over bone, stored energy stores empty. The stomach was a hollow knot pulling against his spine.
Memories settled into the neural tissue with the finality of wet ink drying on ledger parchment.
He was Pei Jing. Age sixteen. Third son of the second branch of the Pei Clan in Cloudford Town, Azure Province, under the Great Yan Empire. An unremarkable youth whose spirit vein channels had been declared fully barren eight years ago by an itinerant Taoist.
Zero spiritual roots. A fine china vase without a neck.
Four hours earlier, three collection thugs from the Black Tiger Gang cornered him behind the grain stalls. They wanted twelve copper cash for the “market preservation toll.” His empty pockets yielded only peach pits. Then, the leader drove an iron-toed boot into his chest. It snapped his collarbone across the stone gutter.
The boy had died of body shock and freezing sickness forty minutes past midnight.
The clerk had arrived thirty minutes later.
Pei Jing measured the burst in his broken collar bone. Pain was merely spark tracking data. It carried data regarding clockwork limits.
Current balance: total insolvency.
A faint grey shimmer flickered across his outer vision.
He blinked, expecting an eye tear from the skull blow. The shimmer didn’t scatter. It resolved into sharp characters resembling stone carvings carved into cold mountain slate. There was no golden glow, no chime, and no voice. The text stood in plain monospace shape upon his eye nerve:
Pei Jing studied the slate for seven heartbeats.
The shape was rigid. Thirty-eight characters wide. No flourishes. It mirrored the double-entry accounting ledgers he had audited through hundreds of midnight sessions, before a lung embolism had dropped him onto his desk.
Focused training: 0.0 / 2.0 Hours. Daily Accumulation: +0.0%.
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. The slate remained, dimming slightly when he shifted his focal plane toward the alley’s exit.
“Not a delusion,” he whispered. His voice was cracked, raw from swallowed rainwater. “An audit engine.”
He rolled onto his right shoulder. He used the uninjured side of his back to wedge himself upright against the damp brick wall. The broken collar bone shifted, bone fragments rubbing with a wet click. Pei Jing held his breath until the burst passed. That let his heart rate slow from ninety beats per minute down to sixty-five.
He reached down with his right hand and ripped the lower hem of his coarse linen tunic.
Working with fingers stiffened by cold, he formed a tight sling, binding his left forearm across his ribs to immobilize the shoulder joint. Without leverage on the upper arm bone, the fractured collar bone stopped grinding.
He checked his pockets.
Three copper cash rested in the lining of his right sleeve, overlooked by the thugs. That was because the pocket had torn and dropped the coins into the cuff seam.
Three copper cash. In Cloudford Town, three copper cash bought three steamed sorghum buns or one small cup of heated lard broth.
“Capital exists,” he noted. “Non-zero.”
He pushed off the wall and stepped into the open drizzle.
Cloudford Town at the fourth watch was a maze of wet grey tile roofs, stone alleys, and the smell of sodden charcoal. Situated at the junction of the Cloudford River and southern mountain passes, it survived on iron mining and river barge commerce.
The Pei Clan had once owned three working iron veins in the southern hills. Over thirty years, through river piracy and the aggressive spreading of the neighboring Zhao Clan, those holdings had shrunk to a single exhausted slope of low-grade hematite. The family lived on credit and old family dignity, both rapidly depreciating assets.
Pei Jing moved with a low, measured stride. He kept his feet flat, testing cobblestones before committing his balance point. Walking with a broken collarbone needed minimizing upright back-and-forth swing. Every bob of the torso translated into sideways tearing force at the fracture site.
It took him twenty-eight minutes to cross the two li to the western outskirts. There, the backup compound of the Pei Clan stood behind crumbling mud walls.
The heavy elm gate was barred from within. He didn’t knock. Awakening the gatekeeper would generate inquiries and pointless scolding from elders who viewed his existence as an embarrassment.
Instead, he skirted the outer edge to the southwest corner, crawling through a drainage under-road drain behind a wild jujube hedge. The wet granite scraped his ribs, but the bone held.
He emerged into the overgrown courtyard of the West Pavilion.
This was his chosen quarters. Three drafty timber rooms roofed with mossy tiles. It was separated from the main manor by an orchard of dead plum trees. The yard was empty except for a stone water trough, a hardwood practice post. A flat bench of split pine under the southern roof edge.
Resting on that pine bench was a heavy box-shaped stone.
The object was eight inches long, two inches thick, and dark as dried ink. Quarried from the deep dark rock veins of Black Mountain, it was an old whetstone his deceased grandfather had brought back from royal border campaigns. Its surface was glass-smooth in the center, dished from decades of sharpening sickles, skinning knives, and clan sabers.
Pei Jing approached the bench and touched the stone with his right fingertips. It was cold, dense, and unbending.
A soft slate pop-up alert shifted in his floating sight screen:
Pei Jing sat down on the pine bench.
He looked at his right hand. The knuckles were raw, scraped from his fall in the alley, but the wrist bones were intact. The tendon posture was sound.
“The last owner of this body died waiting for someone to deliver justice,” Pei Jing murmured. “He waited for his father to confront the gang. He waited for clan elders to distribute healing paste. He waited for heaven to grant him a spiritual root.”
He reached into his sleeve, retrieved the three copper cash, and laid them neatly on the surface of the Black Mountain Whetstone.
The brass coins made a clear click against the dark rock.
“Justice is an unbacked debt,” he said. “Nobody pays it unless forced by forced payout.”
The door to the side kitchen creaked open.
A woman stepped out beneath the roof edge. She carried a chipped brown clay pot bowl covered by a bamboo steamer lid. She wore an indigo apron patched with dark cloth at the waist. Her hair was tied with a carved bone pin. She smelled of wood ash, wild scallions, and old sheep fat.
Aunt Fang. The widowed elder cousin of his father, relegated to the west kitchen after her husband died in the mine collapse twelve years ago.
She saw him sitting on the bench, his face coated in dried blood. His left arm was bound across his chest in a stained rag.
She didn’t scream. In Cloudford Town, blood on young men was as common as mud on cart wheels.
She walked over, her cloth shoes squelching on courtyard moss. Then she set the bowl down beside the three copper coins on the whetstone.
“Scar-Face Sun?” she asked. Her voice was flat, dry as winter reeds.
“Three of them,” Pei Jing replied.
She reached down, took his chin in calloused fingers, and tilted his head toward the pale light. Her thumb pressed along the edge of his left collar bone. When the bone shifted, his jaw tightened, but he made no sound.
“Broken,” she said. “The clan medicine room has three jars of black-bone salve left. The First Branch locked the cabinet yesterday. They say every ounce must be reserved for the second young master’s preparation for the county martial trial.”
“I know.”
“Your father spent the night at the smelting yard. Two carts of iron melted rock waste were rejected by the Zhao Clan inspectors at the river wharf. If he can’t pay the river dock-wait by noon, they will impound the draft oxen.”
“I know.”
Aunt Fang pulled back her hand and wiped her thumb on her apron. She lifted the bamboo lid from the clay pot bowl.
Inside was a grey mass of coarse millet porridge, boiled with mountain greens and two spoonfuls of cold sheep fat clotted into white islands on the surface. It was peasant food, heavy and sour, but dense with animal fat.
“Eat,” she said. “You can’t mend bone with cold air.”
“Thank you, Aunt Fang.”
“Don’t thank me. If you die in this courtyard, I have to pay two coppers to the grave-diggers to haul your carcass out. I don’t have two coppers to waste on third sons.”
She turned and walked back toward the kitchen, the door clicking shut behind her.
Pei Jing didn’t hesitate. He picked up the baked-clay spoon with his right hand and began to eat.
The sheep fat was rank, coating his tongue in grease. But as hot starch slid into his empty stomach, an intense living signal flared through his gut. His body seized upon the nutrients with desperate avidity.
In his vision, the slate HUD flickered:
Pei Jing scraped the bottom of the bowl clean. Every grain of millet was chewed thoroughly and swallowed.
He set the bowl down, picked up the three copper cash, and returned them to his sleeve.
The rain slackened, giving way to cold fog rolling off the Cloudford River. Across the manor, the bronze bell of the main old family hall tolled three times, signaling morning chores.
Pei Jing stood up from the pine bench.
His left collar bone ached with a dull, throbbing heat, but the sling held the fragments true. His stomach, warmed by the fat and millet, was already directing nutrients into his bloodstream.
He walked to the center of the courtyard, five paces from the hardwood practice post.
The ground was mud and crushed river gravel. He planted his right foot forward, sank his weight until his hips were level with his knees. Then he braced his core against his spine.
Mountain-Cleaving Fist. Stance One: The Rooted Cauldron.
The stance pulled sharply at his left chest muscle, sending a flare through the fractured collarbone. Pei Jing adjusted his chest bone by half an inch, shifting the load onto his spinal erectors and right broad back muscles.
The slate HUD shifted, its stone-carved lines locking into position:
Pei Jing locked his gaze onto the dark grain of the hardwood post.
The timer began to tick.
In his last life, he had seen men run enterprises into ruin through speculation and unearned windfalls. In this world, men prayed to distant immortals and cursed their bodies when heaven refused to answer.
Both were bankrupt strategies.
Two hours of sweat equaled ten percent. Ten days equaled one hundred percent. The math was unchanging, indifferent to birth, bloodline, or the contempt of clan elders.
Rain washed the blood from his cheek into the mud below. Pei Jing didn’t move. He began his audit.