Rain fell steadily over the tiles of the West Pavilion, drumming against the rotting spruce doorstep.
Pei Jing sat stripped to the waist upon the split-pine bench. In his left hand he held an eight-inch rib bone from the male wolf, boiled clean and scraped of bone-skin. In his right hand he held the antler-handled knife.
He tapped the flat of the blade against his left ribs, counting down the between-rib spaces.
Ninth rib. Tenth rib.
Eighteen days ago, when the Black Tiger Gang guards had booted him across the stone gutter behind the grain stalls, those two ribs had suffered micro-fissures. Every breath in had brought the sharp, sickening prick of bone ends flexing against parietal lung lining.
Now, his thumb pressed hard into the rib gap.
He applied forty pounds of point pressure directly over the last fracture line.
There was no yielding. Beneath the skin, the bone had not merely bridged. It had formed an annular callus of woven bone twice as thick as the original outer-brain shaft. The micro-fissures were gone, replaced by a dense stone sleeve that resisted the knife handle like seasoned oak.
He opened his right hand and looked at his knuckles.
The grey thick, horn-hard was thicker today. It extended in an unbroken layer of keratinized armor from the knuckles down over the proximal finger bones. When he clenched his fist, the skin locked together without pinching, forming an unbending striking plate.
A memory surfaced from the deep neural tissue of the original host.
Eight years ago.
An itinerant Daoist from the Jade Purity Sect had passed through Cloudford Town in an ox-drawn cart draped in yellow silk. The Pei Clan, desperate to restore its declining fortunes after the loss of two iron veins to the rival Zhao Clan, had presented twelve youths of the second and third branches for spirit-root test in the old family hall.
Pei Jing had been eight years old.
The old family courtyard had been packed with elders, branch stewards, and nervous mothers. At the head of the stone steps sat Patriarch Pei Canghai, his fingers drumming against his rosewood chair. Beside him stood First Branch heir Pei Feng, then ten years old, whose test ten minutes earlier had revealed a faint, three-inch cloudy earth root—enough to earn him three spirit pills and personal coaching from the clan’s martial teacher.
Then came the boy Pei Jing.
The itinerant Daoist, a man with teeth yellowed by sulfur pills and fingernails grown two inches long, had seized the boy’s wrist with cold, dry fingers. He had pressed a sliver of cloudy green spirit jade against Pei Jing’s pulse point.
For three minutes, the courtyard had stood in breathless silence.
The jade had remained dull grey. Not a single spark of azure, crimson, or gold had flickered within its crystal-clear matrix.
The Daoist had dropped the boy’s arm as though handling an unwashed turnip.
“Barren,” the Daoist had announced to the gathered elders. His voice was preserved in the host’s memory with photographic care: “The spiritual root is absent. Worse, the spirit vein sky-slit at the crown is fused shut. The boy is a fine china bottle without a neck. No sky qi can enter. He’s a mortal husk, fit only to shovel melted rock waste in the family mines.”
The reaction had been instant. Patriarch Pei Canghai had looked away, his gaze dismissing the boy’s branch from clan investment. The branch stewards had begun whispering, recalculating grain rations.
Only one man had remained motionless: Pei Hongcheng, the third son of the second branch, Pei Jing’s father. Hongcheng stood in the shadow of the stone lion. He had simply tapped the brass bowl of his long tobacco pipe against his leather boot. He watched his son walk down the steps with quiet, unreadable eyes.
From that afternoon onward, the West Pavilion had been abandoned to cold wind and dry weeds.
Pei Jing smiled. It was a cold, careful smile.
“A fine china bottle without a neck,” he repeated aloud.
He stood up, walking over to the iron cooking pot on the hearth. Inside, three pounds of wolf ribs simmered in a golden broth thick with melted joint padding and rendered animal fat.
He lifted a ladleful of the hot liquid and studied the water’s skin.
The Daoist had been correct in his watching, but fully unfit in his systemic analysis.
To a fighter, human bodies were open channels. Fighters sat upon mountain peaks with thirty-six spirit vein gates forced wide, inhaling surrounding spiritual energy from the heavens, circulating it through permeable channels, and storing it within an ephemeral dantian.
Because their vessels were open, they were also porous.
When a fighter was injured, spiritual qi leaked from their wounds like water from a cracked sieve. When they aged, sky essence evaporated through their pores. They needed constant healing pills and surrounding spirit veins simply to maintain heat-powered balance against the surrounding environment.
Pei Jing was different.
His spirit vein gates were not merely closed. They were hermetically sealed. Sky qi couldn’t enter from the air—true.
But neither could anything escape.
His vessel was an adiabatic chamber. A closed physical container.
An ordinary mortal burned up two pounds of wolf meat. Then, their stomach tract absorbed forty percent of the amino acids and fats, excreting sixty percent as waste heat and solid waste scum.
Pei Jing burned up wolf meat. Then, the Daily Accumulation Ledger acted as a high-pressure chemical centrifuge.
He closed his eyes and summoned the body audit:
Pei Jing drank the broth.
He felt every drop hit the floor of his stomach. There was no sluggishness, no after-meal stupor. Within two minutes, the gastric mucosa broke the wolf fat into tiny micelles. The fluid-draining ducts drew the food fats into the chest duct, dumping high-thickness fuel directly into the main chest blood vessel.
From there, the heart pumped the nutrients not into fatty reserves around the waist, but down to the bone surface of his forearms, the connective tissue fibers of his knee tendons, and the horn-protein sheets on his knuckles.
Every gram of fuel remained inside the ledger. Zero slippage. Zero waste.
“A fine china bottle doesn’t absorb dew from the morning clouds,” Pei Jing said. He set the wooden ladle back onto the shelf. “But if you fill it with pure oil and strike a spark within, it becomes a bomb.”
Before training, he tended to the harvest assets in the shed.
The three wolf pelts hung from level cedar poles suspended beneath the southern roof edge. During the early morning, he had scraped away the fat under the skin layers using the rounded, dull back-edge of his skinning knife. He had then rubbed the wet hides with a mixture of dry wood ash and coarse stone salt to dehydrate the skin connective tissue and inhibit microbial putrefaction.
The hides were stiffening into thick, frost-resistant leather. The grey fur was dense, clean, and entirely free of blood rot.
“Inventory condition: prime,” he noted. “Estimated retail value: two silver coins in Cloudford Bazaar.”
He tied his hemp trousers tight around his waist, laced his straw sandals. Then he stepped out into the steady rain.
The mud in the courtyard was four inches deep, slick with decomposing plum leaves.
Pei Jing planted his bare heels into the muck. He rotated his hips, finding the precise three-point balance between his calcaneus, first metatarsal, and fifth metatarsal. His toes clawed into the clay, establishing traction like the iron cleats of an anchor chain.
He raised his fists.
Mountain-Cleaving Fist: Form Two, Iron Mountain Lean.
He drove his shoulder forward into the damp air, generating torque from the twist of his left knee, through the pelvis, along the lower back muscles, and discharging it through the left acromion.
Whuff.
The shifted weight of air produced a sharp, bone-shaking pressure wave.
The rain droplets striking his bare shoulders didn’t linger. The skin was dense, hot from nonstop body-energy synthesis, causing the cold rainwater to bead up and roll off his upper back muscle like water on greased leather.
He transitioned seamlessly into Form Three: Splitting Ridge Hammer.
He raised both fists overhead. He locked his core until his belly wall looked like a washboard of carved cedar. He brought the downward hammer-fist down along an upright curved arc. It caught the apex of the moving recoil with his lats.
The air hissed. A spray of mist exploded from his knuckles at the bottom of the stroke.
He kept the deliberate drill for one hundred and twenty minutes without pause.
Fifty strikes left. Fifty strikes right. Twenty-four repetitions of the low-angle sweep. Thirty repetitions of the downward hammer-fist.
When the two-hour mark elapsed, the slate HUD ticked over with cold exact certainty:
Fifty percent.
Halfway to the second tier of the martial art.
Pei Jing lowered his hands, drawing the cold mountain rain into his lungs. The air felt sweet, tasting of wet spruce and ozone.
His left collar bone didn’t twinge. His ribs didn’t ache.
His vessel was sound, solvent, and steadily pooling equity against a hostile world.
Returning under the cedar roof edges, he took the Black Mountain Whetstone from his pack and dipped it in a basin of cold rainwater. He sat on the low bench. He passed the mountain chopper’s edge along the dished dark rock thirty times to clear the morning’s nicked edges before wiping the dark stone dry.