The hanging carcass of the Razor-Backed Swamp Boar swayed gently on its iron hook, dripping thick, jelly-like blood onto the greasy granite flags.
Around the processing yard, the rhythmic hacking of bone-saws sputtered and died down. Five other skinners stopped their work. They leaned against their bloody maple blocks to watch the newcomer make a fool of himself.
“Eleven minutes?” one skinner sneered under his breath. “Even Old Tu takes a quarter of an hour to skin an iron-bristle tusker without slicing the flank.”
Pei Jing didn’t hear the whispers. His fingers closed around the cord-wrapped handle of his hard dark metal cleaver. Then, the noisy, foul-smelling yard shrank to a sphere of three paces.
He stood before the massive, arched spine of the boar.
In the eyes of an ordinary fighter, a demon beast was an obstacle. A heap of savage muscle, thick scales, and toxic fluids that had to be battered and ripped apart by brute force.
In Pei Jing’s eyes, the carcass was a three-space-folding clockwork blueprint.
Every living vertebrate was built around matching principles of building. Skeletal roof beams bearing squeezing, elastic tendon cables maintaining tension, and muscle-sheath planes providing lubricated slip surfaces between muscle bundles. The eight-hundred-pound boar was simply a larger, denser variation of the mountain oxen he had dissected during his third mortal realm of martial training.
