The scrap heap behind the second branch’s smelting shed was an iron graveyard.
Piles of rusted melted rock waste, shattered bloomery hearth tiles, and twisted carriage fittings lay half-buried under frozen black mud. In Cloudford Town, the metalworking of iron was divided into two distinct tiers: the primitive low-heat bloomeries used by the declining Pei Clan. That made spongy forged iron riddled with stone-glass melted rock waste. The modern blast furnaces owned by the Zhao Clan. It used water-powered bellows and charcoal kilns to produce high-carbon cast iron.
Neither produced the metal Pei Jing needed.
Forged iron was too soft. An edge ground onto bog iron rolled over when striking bone. Cast iron was too hard and brittle. A cast needle snapped in half upon striking leather armor.
At the fifth watch of the evening, when the foundry smiths had washed their soot-stained forearms in the canal. Then they left for the tavern quarter, Pei Jing walked among the rust mounds.
He searched for spring steel.
Beside a broken timber ore cart that had tumbled down the South Vein slope three years ago, he found the shattered mid-air assembly.
It was an elliptical leaf spring forged from imported southern steel. Dense, fine-grained hypereutectoid carbon steel, roughly 0.7 to 0.8 percent carbon, cooled in oil and hardened to withstand repetitive cyclic shock without plastic warping. The main leaf had fractured. But the backup leaves, half an inch wide and a quarter-inch thick, remained clean and unpitted beneath a protective crust of dried wagon grease.
Pei Jing retrieved a cold-sett chisel and a five-pound iron sledgehammer from the open forge shop hearth.
He laid the spring steel leaf across the cold anvil face.
CLANG. CLANG. CRACK.
With twelve precise, heavy strikes, he snapped the steel strip into twelve uniform segments, each exactly six inches long.
He gathered the twelve steel blanks, wrapped them in an oiled rag. Then he slipped through the western shadows back to the West Pavilion.
In his room, the small oil lamp burned with its yellow sesame flame.
Pei Jing set the Black Mountain Whetstone upon the split-pine bench.
The eight-inch dark rock slab was an unbending master. Unlike softer sandstone wheels that gouged and formed hollows under hard pressure, the fine-grained fiery stone kept its true flat surface. It cut hardened steel slowly, removing tiny shavings of metal without heating the alloy past its critical temper point. If a grinder used an emery wheel, friction heat would draw the temper, softening the steel. The wet dark rock stone kept the steel cool, preserving its spring-temper stretch.
He poured three drops of well water onto the dark surface.
He picked up the first steel blank.
To create an effective hidden projectile, mass, aerodynamics, and end-post penetration mechanics had to be balanced into a single moving equation.
A round needle point was inefficient. Upon striking leather armor or dense musculature, it relied purely on wedging force. It allowed elastic fibers to pinch the shaft and bleed forward speed.
Pei Jing ground each steel segment into a three-sided needle-point arrow profile.
Three facets. Each facet was ground at an acute twelve-degree angle. It ended in a needle point as fine as a wasp’s sting. Along the three edges ran razor-sharp ridges. When a three-sided needle-point arrow pierced flesh, the three cutting edges cut tiny blood vessels, nerves, and muscle-sheath sheets at the same time, preventing tissue stretch from clamping the projectile.
Shhh-krrr. Shhh-krrr. Shhh-krrr.
Black metal shavings—a slurry of powdered steel crystals and stone grit—gathered across the face of the dark rock.
He rotated the steel blank sixty degrees with every ten strokes.
First side. Second side. Third side.
The sound tone of the dark rock shifted as the metal thinned. It rose from a coarse scratch to a high, clear ring like a tiny temple chime.
He measured the balance point on his index finger. The balance point rested exactly two and a quarter inches from the tip. Slightly front-heavy, ensuring that wind-cutting drag on the tube-shaped tail would stabilize the needle along its high-speed flight path without requiring feather fletching.
It took three hours of relentless, careful grinding to finish all twelve needles.
When completed, the twelve steel bodkins lay in a row upon the pine table. It shone with a dull, blue-grey satin finish. Each was six inches long, weighing forty-two grams.
He dipped each needle into the leftover rendered wolf fat. He formed a tiny hydrophobic film that sealed the freshly ground steel against rust and sky rusting.
Next came the delivery gearwork.
A martial artist who reached into a pouch or waist sash to draw a projectile telegraphed the attack by at least four hundred split seconds. An alert opponent with Tier 2 Flesh Forging could duck, raise a shield, or shift their balance point before the hand cleared the belt.
The attack had to emerge with zero practice motion.
Pei Jing took a strip of cured rawhide salvaged from the wolf harvest.
He used his antler-handled knife. He cut two box-shaped arm bracers, nine inches long, contoured to fit the volar surface of his forearms. On the inner side of each wrist guard, he stitched six narrow leather channels using boiled deer sinew thread.
Each channel gripped a needle by friction alone.
At the wrist end of the wrist guard, he fashioned a simple clockwork release. A flat tongue of horn-heavy leather that sat flush against his palm. When his wrist was cocked backward at twenty degrees—the natural position of an open-hand defensive block—the horn tongue retracted. That left the needle tips free.
A sudden, whip-like snap of the flexor carpi radialis would launch the needle from its friction sleeve directly along the line of the forearm.
He strapped the left wrist guard to his arm, pulling the rawhide laces tight.
The six steel needles rested flush against the underside of his arm, fully hidden beneath the loose, frayed cuff of his coarse wool tunic.
He stepped out into the dark orchard.
The dead plum trees stood stiff in the starlight, their bare branches coated in white frost.
Fifteen paces from the southern roof edge, Pei Jing had propped a two-inch-thick plank of green pine against a stone wall. On the wood, he had drawn three nested circles in black charcoal: an outer ring eight inches wide, an inner ring four inches wide, and a central bullseye the size of a copper coin.
He stood fifteen paces away.
His hands hung loose at his sides. His shoulders were relaxed. His eyes didn’t stare at the target. His gaze softened, taking in the entire fifteen-pace hall.
Mechanics: distance, thirteen point five meters. Mass: forty-two grams. Flight path drop: two inches at twenty meters per second. Target: center of chest mass.
His left shoulder didn’t twitch. His chest didn’t rotate.
His left wrist snapped upward twenty degrees, the extensor muscles contracting in eighty split seconds. At the apex of the snap, his forearm pulsed forward six inches.
THWIP.
A low, metal whistle sliced the night air.
CHUNK.
The pine plank shuddered.
Pei Jing walked across the frozen mud to inspect the wood.
The three-sided needle-point arrow was embedded two and a half inches deep into the green pine, dead center within the inner four-inch charcoal ring. The three cutting edges had split the sapwood cleanly without bending the hardened steel tip.
He gripped the rear shaft with his thick, horn-hard thumb and forefinger. He pulled it free with a heard pop.
“Penetration depth: two point five inches of green pine,” he noted. “Enough to pierce boiled leather armor, rib muscle, and penetrate the heart-sac at fifteen paces.”
He returned to his mark.
Over the next two hours, Pei Jing carried out one hundred deliberate throws. Fifty with the right arm, fifty with the left.
He varied the release: throwing from a static stance, throwing while stepping backward, throwing from a low crouch as if recovering from a stumble. Every throw was carried out without telegraphing—no shoulder wind-up, no facial tension, no shifting of the hips.
By the eightieth throw, the needle struck the central one-inch circle with nine out of ten repetitions.
At the conclusion of the hundredth release, the floating sight screen surfaced:
Pei Jing collected all twelve needles from the pine target, wiped the pine sap from the bevels with an oily rag. Then he slotted them back into their forearm sleeves.
He returned inside, stoked the hearth fire. Then he stewed the last pound of salted wolf meat with wild ginger and herb waste scum broth. As the nutrient-rich steam filled the room, he drank the broth. He felt the amino acids and fats flow into his forearms and fingers to repair the micro-tears in his wrist tendons.
Under his cuffs, the six-inch steel rods lay invisible, cold, and ready.
In an audit, visible assets were presented to the tax collectors to satisfy check.
Hidden reserves were kept off the balance sheet to liquidate unexpected emergencies.