Old Qian’s Pawnshop occupied a low-roofed brick shack at the corner of Scabbard Lane. There, the smell of stale vinegar mingled with moldy damp paper.
Inside, the light was dim. A single animal fat candle guttered in a saucer of sand. It cast jittery shadows across shelves piled high with pawned peasant quilts, rusted sickles, chipped brass candlesticks, and grease-stained ledgers from bankrupt shopkeepers.
Behind a lattice counter of blackened hardwood sat Old Qian.
The pawnbroker was sixty years old, with waterfalls clouding his left eye and fingers as thin and crooked as dry ginger roots. He wore a greasy wool skullcap pulled low over his ears to ward off the draft that whistled through the rotting wallboards.
“Looking to sell or buy, young master?” Old Qian rasped, not bothering to lift his glasses. “If you’re selling clan clothes, the second branch’s credit line was cut off at the autumn equinox.”
“Buying,” Pei Jing said. “Second-hand scrolls. Discarded martial texts.”
Old Qian gave a dry wheeze that served as a laugh. He pointed a crooked thumb toward a wicker basket sitting in the damp corner beside an empty pickle crock.
“Over there. Rubbish brought in by caravan drivers and wounded escort guards who needed coffin money. Two copper cash to look. Take what you want if your purse has teeth.”
Pei Jing walked over to the basket.
The basket contained twenty-odd volumes: torn copies of introductory arithmetic, popular dramatic ballads, and damp, insect-eaten pamphlets detailing deepest breathing exercises for tea-house performers. Most were missing covers, their binding strings rotted to black lint.
Pei Jing’s fingers sifted through the pile with clean, steady care.
He wasn’t looking for esoteric training scriptures or mystical qi breath flow arts. Training scriptures needed spiritual roots—spirit vein channels to absorb surrounding heaven-and-earth energy. For a host body whose spirit vein gates were hermetically sealed, reading a qi manual was like pouring fine tea onto a glazed baked-clay plate.
He was looking for an external hardening discipline.
A clockwork protocol that used direct physical trauma, clockwork shock, and chemical stimulation to force living rebuilding.
Near the bottom of the basket, beneath a damp ledger of grain tolls from the twenty-second year of Emperor Yongtai, his fingers touched coarse paper.
It was a thin, box-shaped booklet bound with dry rawhide string. The cover was dark brown, stiff with dried sweat and old lamp oil. On the front, four characters were written in heavy, blocky ink:
Iron Cloth Body Art.
Pei Jing opened the booklet.
The paper was coarse mulberry fiber, yellowed and brittle at the margins. The text was with woodblock illustrations of a human torso marked not with spirit vein channels, but with impact zones: the chest muscles, the broad back muscles, the between-rib spaces of the ribs, the dorsal planes of the forearms, and the anterior crest of the shin bone.
The text laid out a brutal, primitive methodology:
Phase One: Abrasive Sandbag Impact. Soak skin in warm astringent wash of bark and ginger to open pores and engorge tiny blood vessel beds. Suspend sack of river gravel and iron melted rock waste. Deliver one thousand blunt strikes daily to chest, ribs, and arms until flesh deadens and hematomas turn black. Repeat for one hundred days.
Phase Two: Wooden Cudgel Striking. Phase Three: Iron Rod Rolling.
The final three pages were torn away. That left only ragged paper fringes. A water stain had blurred the herb compounding notes on the fifth leaf.
Pei Jing held the booklet in his hands.
A grey shimmer crystal-hardened across his eye field:
The Ledger accepted the text.
The missing pages and blurred herb notes were irrelevant. The Ledger didn’t need a complete masterwork to initiate training. It needed only a valid clockwork hypothesis. The focused training was engaged. Then, the audit engine would interpolate the procedural gaps and optimize the body adaptation automatically.
Pei Jing closed the manual and walked back to the counter.
“How much for this torn booklet?”
Old Qian squinted through his brass-rimmed glasses, adjusting them on the bridge of his crooked nose. He tapped his yellow fingernail against the battered cover.
“Iron Cloth Art. An authentic military hardening method from the Northern Frontier guard post. Three silver coins.”
Pei Jing looked at the old pawnbroker with a flat, steady stare.
“Three pages are missing from the rear,” Pei Jing said. “The fifth page is water-damaged, obliterating the formula for the recovery wash. Without the wash, an untrained fighter striking gravel bags will suffer fat under the skin black rot and permanent muscle-sheath fibrosis within three weeks.”
He paused, resting his callused hand on the counter.
“The book has sat in that wicker basket since the summer rains. The paper is damp with mold. In another sixty days, silverfish will have reduced the spine to dust. Five hundred copper cash.”
Old Qian blinked, his good eye twitching.
“Six hundred,” the pawnbroker grumbled, snatching the booklet and weighing it in his hand. “Not a copper less. Take it or put it back with the ballads.”
Pei Jing reached into his sleeve. From his cash reserve, he counted out six hundred copper cash, stacking them in twelve neat pillars of fifty coins on the dark wood. The bronze coins clicked with crisp care.
He took the manual, slipped it into his inner tunic, and walked out into the lane.
He returned to the West Pavilion before midday.
He didn’t waste an hour.
From the storage shed behind the kitchen, he retrieved a heavy two-ply canvas grain sack that had once held coarse salt. He walked to the drainage ditch beside the abandoned plum orchard, where iron melted rock waste and crushed quartz gravel had been dumped decades ago during the construction of the smelting kilns.
He shoveled eighty pounds of sharp river gravel, quartz nodules, and cold, porous iron melted rock waste into the canvas sack.
He bound the neck of the bag with three wraps of oiled hemp rope, threw the line over a level spruce beam beneath the southern roof edge of the pavilion. Then he hoisted the sandbag until it hung at chest height.
Next came the chemical wash.
Pei Jing set the small iron cooking pot on the hearth, filling it with well water. He broke open the bundles of herb waste scum purchased from Su Mei’er. Dried angelica heads, stringy ginseng rootlets, and chipped tiger-bone bark. He pounded them with a flat river stone into coarse shreds and threw them into the pot, adding three generous spoonfuls of wild ginger balm.
He brought the decoction to a boil.
Within twenty minutes, the liquid turned the color of dark tea. It bubbled with an astringent, peppery steam that cleared his sinuses. Then it made his eyes water.
Pei Jing stripped to his hemp trousers.
He dipped a coarse linen cloth into the steaming liquid, wrung it out with his bare hands. Then he began scrubbing his chest, shoulders, and forearms.
The heat was intense. The bitter pine-resin and gingerols pierced his outer skin layer, dilating every tiny blood vessel in his deep skin. His skin flushed crimson, burning with a deep, prickly warmth as nearby blood flow tripled.
He stepped out into the frosty courtyard and faced the suspended canvas sack.
Eighty pounds of gravel and iron melted rock waste hung motionless in the cold air.
Pei Jing widened his stance, dropping his balance point into the horse stance. He exhaled a long breath through his teeth, tightened his belly wall, and raised his left forearm.
WHACK.
He drove the lateral edge of his forearm bone into the gravel sack.
The impact sent a sharp, bone-shaking jolt through his forearm into his elbow joint. Inside the canvas, the jagged edges of quartz gravel and iron melted rock waste pressed through the fabric, biting into his amber skin with hundreds of tiny points of pressure.
Pei Jing didn’t wince.
He pivoted, driving his right forearm into the opposite side of the sack.
WHACK.
Then he stepped forward, bracing his chest muscles and driving his chest directly into the swinging eighty-pound mass.
THUD.
The moving rebound drove the air from his lungs. The gravel ground against his ribs, testing the woven bone calluses he had formed over the past month.
He kept the rhythm.
Left forearm. Right forearm. Left shoulder. Right shoulder. Chest. Ribs.
Fifty strikes. Two hundred strikes. Five hundred strikes.
The hours slipped past under the grey sky. Sweat poured from his brow, washing away the herbal wash, only for Pei Jing to return to the steaming cooking pot, re-apply the hot liquid, and resume the battering.
The sharp gravel bruised the surface tiny blood vessels. That turned the amber skin dark purple, but under the relentless surge of blood flow and the dense connective tissue matrix of Tier 3 Skin Tempering, the hematomas didn’t pool. The nearby trauma acted as a cellular forge, signaling his osteoblasts and fibroblasts to lay down fresh layers of dense connective tissue.
Right at the two-hour mark, the floating sight screen locked into place:
Pei Jing halted.
He rested his palms on his knees, his breath whistling in steady rhythm through his teeth.
Across his chest and forearms, the skin was hot, swollen, and humming with a dense, dull shaking. But the underlying bone was intact, free of fractures or load-bearing misalignment.
He looked at the swinging canvas sack, where flecks of white quartz dust clung to the rough canvas.
“Ten percent,” he said quietly.
He turned toward his dark quarters, stoked the hearth fire. Then he retrieved the Black Mountain Whetstone from the timber shelf. He wet the dark stone with a drop of kettle water and ran his paring blade along the fine groove twenty times. He listened to the clean rasp of steel meeting stone before halving a pound of salted wolf meat for the evening cooking pot.
The foundation was laid. Nine more days, and the cloth would turn to bronze.