The silence in the courtyard grew heavy, thick with the smell of wet soot and sulfur.
Pei Jing stood with his feet planted shoulder-width apart on the cold granite flat stone slabs. His weight rested sixty percent on his heels, forty percent on the balls of his feet, his knees bent by fifteen degrees to establish an unbroken load-bearing bridge down to the foundation stones. His arms remained loosely folded behind his back.
Zhao Bao spat betel nut juice onto the snow between them.
“Cocky little corpse,” Zhao Bao muttered. His thick lips curled into a grin of feral pleasure. “Let’s see if your bones are harder than your tongue.”
Zhao Bao stepped back two paces. He gripped the six-foot ash heavy club with both hands, his knuckles turning pale against the oiled wood.
He started the first strike.
It was a level sweeping blow, designed to shear through the target’s left shoulder muscle, break the acromion, and shatter the collar bone beyond medical repair. Zhao Bao’s waist rotated with the heavy torque of Flesh Forging Tier 2, his back muscles bunching under his wolf-pelt vest like thick ropes.
The twenty-six-pound ash heavy club tore through the freezing air with a sound shriek.
WHOOSH.
Pei Jing didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink.
At three hundred split seconds before contact, he exhaled a sharp breath through his nostrils, dropping his balance point by one inch and engaging the broad back muscles on his left side. His deep muscle layer locked, the bronze skin matrix of Tier 2 Iron Cloth stiffening into its energy-scattering state.
THWACK.
The iron-banded ash metal ring slammed directly into Pei Jing’s left shoulder.
The sound that echoed across the Pei Manor courtyard was not the wet crunch of fracturing human bone.
It was the dull, heavy report of an iron sledgehammer striking a bale of hardened rubber.
The violent recoil traveled up the ash shaft in a fraction of a split second, wildly shaking the wood. Zhao Bao’s palms stung as the blast wave reversed into his wrist joints.
Pei Jing didn’t take a step back.
His boots didn’t slide an inch across the snow. His torso remained upright, his spine straight. The impact energy—about four hundred and fifty blasts of heat—had struck the bronze skin, scattered across his chest muscle-sheath network. Then it vented into the granite flat stone slabs through his locked heels.
On his shoulder, the coarse wool of his tunic had been torn open by the iron metal ring.
Beneath the frayed cloth, the bronze skin showed only a pale grey smudge of iron dust. There was no blood. There was no blood bruise. Not a single tiny blood vessel had breached.
Zhao Bao stumbled half a step to his right, his eyes widening in raw incomprehension.
“What...”
Around the courtyard, the thirty onlookers stood frozen. Patriarch Pei Canghai’s jaw hung slack, his cane hovering an inch above the stone steps. Beside him, First Branch heir Pei Feng rubbed his eyes, convinced that the cold mist was distorting his vision.
Pei Hongcheng lowered his tobacco pipe from his chest. His gaze locked onto the bronze sheen exposed beneath his son’s torn tunic.
Pei Jing tilted his head slightly.
“Strike one logged,” Pei Jing said, his voice flat as an audit ledger. “Energy yield: four hundred and fifty blasts of heat. Load-bearing damage: zero percent. You have two strikes leftover.”
Zhao Bao’s face flushed dark crimson, the veins along his temples bulging against his skull like angry leeches.
“Devil’s trick!” Zhao Bao roared.
He didn’t believe in miracles. He was a mining guard who had beaten thirty men to death with his own hands. He knew that human flesh was soft, wet, and fragile. The boy had to be wearing a hidden plate of refined pig iron beneath his tunic.
“I’ll crush you into meat paste!”
Zhao Bao stepped forward, planting his lead foot with enough violence to crack the mortar between the flat stone slabs.
He raised the twenty-six-pound heavy club with both hands. That brought the weapon directly overhead until the iron-banded tip pointed toward the grey clouds. The muscles of his shoulders and triceps swelled to their body limit, veins pulsing with high-pressure blood.
Overhead upright cleave.
The full clockwork power of Flesh Forging Tier 2, multiplied by the gaining speed of gravity and the spinning leverage of a six-foot lever arm. Over six hundred and eighty blasts of heat of bone-shaking force, packed on a two-inch iron metal ring.
CRACK.
The staff dropped like a falling guillotine.
Pei Jing didn’t raise his arms. He stepped his left foot three inches forward, squaring his chest directly to the falling iron.
He took the blow straight onto his chest bone.
BOOM.
A bone-shaking sound wave blasted across the courtyard, blowing loose snow into the air in a five-foot circle around their feet.
The granite flat stone slab beneath Pei Jing’s boots groaned.
A spiderweb of hairline fractures propagated through the grey rock, streaming outward from his heels. The huge downward force of the blow was passed directly through his skeletal column, bypassing his internal organs, and discharged into the bedrock of the earth.
Pei Jing’s chest tightly packed by four tiny fractions of an inch, then snapped back.
The iron metal ring bounced off his chest bone with a sound shriek of tortured wood.
Zhao Bao felt the bone-jarring shaking rip through his hand bones. It tore the skin between his thumb and index finger. The recoil was so violent that the ash staff nearly tore itself from his grip, the wood screaming under the inner tearing stress.
Pei Jing stood unmoved.
His floating sight screen flashed in sharp, rapid pulses:
Pei Jing looked down at his chest.
The wool tunic was split down the middle. Across his chest muscles, the dull bronze skin gleamed with metal thickness, fully unmarked except for a smudge of charcoal soot left by the iron metal ring.
“Strike two logged,” Pei Jing said.
He stepped forward one pace.
His boot came down upon the cracked flat stone slab with a heavy, final thud.
Zhao Bao took a reflex step backward, his boots skidding across the betel nut stain. His chest was heaving, cold sweat pouring down his temples, freezing on his scarred jaw.
He looked at the boy.
This was not a human youth. A human youth broke under twenty-four pounds of iron-banded ash. Even a master of Flesh Forging Tier 3 would have suffered cracked ribs and coughed blood from an unblocked overhead cleave.
“You... What martial art is this?” Zhao Bao gasped, his voice trembling for the first time. “Iron Shirt? Golden Bell? You were declared barren!”
“A barren root doesn’t prevent the buildup of physical capital,” Pei Jing said, his gaze pinning the guard like a sample on an autopsy board. “You have one strike left, Zhao Bao. Deliver it.”
Zhao Bao’s pride, forged through years of unchecked brutality in the mining alleys, shattered into desperate fury.
“Die!”
He abandoned all form. He lunged forward with a desperate, two-handed slanted thrust, aiming the sharp iron point of the metal ring directly at Pei Jing’s throat. A lethal, illegal strike meant to puncture the throat pipe and sever the main neck blood vessel.
Pei Jing didn’t wait for the blow to land.
The contract allowed three unblocked strikes to his person. A lethal thrust aimed at the throat exceeded the boundaries of the Debt-Striking Custom.
When a counter-party breaches the terms of an agreement, the debt converts into immediate forced payout.
Pei Jing’s right hand shot out from behind his back.
His fingers, coated in the dense thick, horn-hard of Tier 1 Mountain-Cleaving Fist, moved with the speed of striking vipers.
CLACK.
His bare fingers clamped around the ash shaft three inches behind the rushing iron metal ring.
The four-hundred-and-twenty-pound clamping force of his hand brought the twenty-six-pound weapon to a dead stop in three tiny fractions of an inch of space.
Zhao Bao was pulled forward by his own driving force, his boots slipping on the ice, his face stopping six inches from Pei Jing’s unblinking eyes.
“The audit is closed,” Pei Jing whispered.
Pei Jing’s left hand rose, snapping forward from the hip.
He drove the heel of his left palm upward into the center of the six-foot ash staff.
Mountain-Cleaving Fist: Splitting Ridge.
CRACK-SHATTER.
The treated, iron-banded ash heavy club—seasoned in boiling oil. It was built to withstand the blows of war clubs—shattered into two jagged pieces.
The sound report was like the blast of a blast charge in an iron pit. Splinters of seasoned ash exploded through the air, scratching Zhao Bao’s cheeks and tearing his wolf-pelt vest.
The blast wave knocked Zhao Bao off his feet.
The guard tumbled backward into the slush, his hands empty, his palms bloody. He stared in abject horror at the two-foot stump of broken wood still smoking in Pei Jing’s iron grip.
The courtyard was as silent as a tomb.
Pei Jing opened his right hand. The splintered iron metal ring fell to the flat stone slabs with a dull, ringing clang that echoed off the granite foundations.
Behind Zhao Bao, the five guards took three same-time steps backward. Their iron-headed clubs shook in their hands, their eyes darting toward the open courtyard gate. Not one of them dared step forward to help their leader up from the mud.
Pei Jing looked down at the guard sprawling on the ground.
“According to Azure Province frontier code, three strikes have finished,” Pei Jing stated, his tone as level as a ledger balance. “The fifty silver coins debt on the South Gate register is settled to zero. If another Zhao cart checker approaches the second branch’s ore wagons, the audit will take place at your family manor.”
He turned his back on Zhao Bao, leaving the guard trembling in the melting snow. Walking back to the stoop where his wool cloak lay, Pei Jing drew the Black Mountain Whetstone from its fold and set it on the timber bench. His fingertips traced the cold dark rock face. He felt the steady stone chill settle the heat in his palms.