When the human heart beats at twenty beats a minute, the rush of bright red blood through the neck-artery canals sounds like distant ocean surf inside the time bones.
Night had settled over the West Mule Market with freezing stillness. Outside the unplaned wallboards of the Resting Ox Inn’s stable loft, the heat hovered near eight degrees below zero. Icicles hung from the cedar roof edges. It caught the faint, yellowish gleam of the distant city gate lanterns.
Below the hayloft, thirty pack mules huddled together in their pens. Their breath rose through the floorboard gaps in steady, warm plumes of white vapor that carried the heavy scent of dry rye straw, horse sweat, and cured leather harness grease.
Pei Jing sat cross-legged on his burlap mat, his chest bare to the freezing draft.
Across his shins, the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber lay in quiet rest. Its twenty-jin hard dark metal steel blade was unpolished, retaining the mottled, slate-grey texture of the cold-forging hammer. Earlier that evening, he had carried out forty careful passes with the Black Mountain Whetstone across its main edge, restoring the eighteen-degree cutting shape before coating the steel in refined rapeseed oil.
Beside his knee sat a freshly opened cedar shipping crate delivered an hour after dusk by a courier from the Sandalwood Exchange.
