Traditional martial arts manuals were filled with fancy waste.
In ancient treatises copied by hand across the Great Yan Empire, saber techniques were given poetic names: Green Dragon Emerging from Water, Wild Goose Sweeping the Reeds, Autumn Wind Scattering Chrysanthemums. Accompanying these titles were elaborate circular flourishes, wrist twirls, and dramatic shoulder rolls designed to display agility during tournament demonstrations or intimidate illiterate bandits.
To Pei Jing, every flourish was a debt.
The faster a blade moves, the harder it hits. And in a real fight, you only have a split second before the other man reacts. A fancy circular flourish adds a foot and a half of wasted motion and slows the cut down by a fatal beat.
In a life-or-death engagement, one hundred and twenty split seconds was the difference between severing a windpipe and taking a spear point through the eye socket.
The old family martial styles of Cloudford Town suffered from this exact defect. The Pei Clan’s own Foundry Hammer Saber relied on wide, heavy, slow overhead chops that left the armpits exposed for half a second. Meanwhile, the Zhao Clan’s Wild Ox Cudgel depended entirely on brutish driving force that overcommitted the fighter’s balance.
Pei Jing stood in the neglected orchard of the West Pavilion. There, the bare plum trees rose like grey bones against the overcast sky.
From a stout level spruce bough, he had suspended three two-inch-thick coils of braided hemp river rope, soaked in cold well water and weighted at the bottom with river stones.
Wet hemp rope was the standard military target used to test sword cuts in the country guard posts. The moisture swelled the plant fiber fibers, binding the plies into a tough, stringy metal tube that closely mimicked the clockwork thickness and heavy drag of human neck muscle and neck bones.
If a swordsman swung with improper edge posture—a variation of even three degrees off the cutting plane—the flat of the blade would drag against the wet fibers, causing the weapon to twist in the hand, wedge in the core, or glance off harmlessly.
Pei Jing rested the three-foot iron mountain saber in its pigskin sword sheath at his left hip.
His hands were loose. His stance was upright, centered over his heels.
He summoned the Ledger’s motion tracking HUD:
Pei Jing drew the saber.
The eight-pound weapon left the pigskin sheath with a clean, muted shhh-click.
He started the first test cut.
Form One: Gale Slit, Low Diagonal Cleave.
He stepped forward with his left foot, rotating his hips thirty degrees and swinging the saber downward at a forty-five-degree angle toward the first hanging rope.
THWACK.
The blade bit through the outer hemp braid, cut three plies of the core, and ground to an abrupt halt halfway through the second rope. The impact sent a sharp turning force into his right wrist, twisting the handle by four degrees.
Pei Jing backed away, examining the cut fibers.
The cut was ragged. The single hemp threads were frayed and chewed rather than sliced cleanly. A smear of yellow hemp oil clung to the left side of the blade belly.
The floating sight screen pulsed with immediate test tracking data:
“A yaw error of three point two degrees,” Pei Jing spoke into the frosty air. “The right wrist pronated twelve split seconds before the sweet spot met the hemp core.”
It was a classic clockwork defect. The wielder’s nervous system, anticipating the violent slowdown of impact, instinctively rolled the wrist forward to brace for the heavy recoil, turning the cutting edge away from the true clockwork force vector.
Pei Jing didn’t practice by mindlessly repeating the flawed movement.
He set the saber down on the pine bench, stood before the hanging ropes. Then he carried out sixty repetitions of the hip rotation and shoulder extension without the weapon.
He analyzed the muscular chain:
The movement didn’t originate in the shoulder. It began in the right rear foot, pressing down into the frozen soil. The ground reaction force traveled up the Achilles tendon, through the hamstring, into the right gluteus maximus. The pelvis snapped forward thirty-eight degrees, pulling the broad back muscles into extreme quirky pre-stretch.
Only when the torso had completed eighty percent of its rotation did the right arm release forward. It swung down the curved arc like a swinging weight.
And at the precise split second of impact, the wrist didn’t roll.
The inner forearm muscle locked in static contraction. That kept the blade’s cutting plane perfectly parallel to the speed vector until the target was fully breached.
He picked up the eight-pound saber.
He took his stance five paces from the three wet ropes.
His breath settled into a slow, three-second cycle. His eyes didn’t stare at the ropes. They looked through the fibers toward the dead grass beyond.
Zero extra gaining speed. True curved path.
He moved.
His rear foot drove into the dirt with a sharp thud.
His hips snapped. The eight-pound mountain saber dropped along a forty-five-degree plane, carving a razor-thin crescent through the winter air.
SWISH.
The sound was not a heavy roar. It was a high, whispering sigh—the sound signed name of a blade parting air without rough churning.
The polished carbon-steel edge met the first wet hemp rope.
There was zero shudder in the handle. Zero shaking sent to the wrist.
The blade sliced through the two inches of wet hemp, crossed the four-inch air gap, sliced through the second rope. Then it cut the third rope in one nonstop, uninterrupted motion.
The saber stopped six inches above the frozen mud, held stationary by Pei Jing’s locked core and braced chest muscles.
For two heartbeats, the three ropes remained suspended in the air, motionless.
Then, three two-foot sections of wet rope slid diagonally off their cut planes, tumbling into the mud with three soft, same-time thumps.
Plop. Plop. Plop.
Pei Jing raised the saber to his eyes.
Along the thirty-six-inch blade, there was no fraying of hemp fibers, no twisting of the spine, and no notch in the carbon core.
He walked over to the cut rope ends hanging from the spruce bough.
He touched the cut face of the center rope.
The surface was glassy, smooth, and specular, as though sliced with a heated razor through soft animal fat. Every single hemp strand had been parted at the exact same level plane, with zero crushing or tearing of the cellular walls.
The floating sight screen locked into place:
Pei Jing continued the practice for another ninety minutes, executing Form Two (Level Waist Slit) and Form Three (Climbing Parrying Slash) against seasoned pine posts set up along the orchard outer edge. Each repetition followed the exact arc calculated by the Ledger, shaving away minute angular deviations until his neuromuscular system carried out the cuts with total, unthinking repeatability.
When dusk arrived, he returned inside his timber quarters.
His body demanded immediate heat-powered compensation. He built a hot fire in the hearth, stewed four pounds of cured pork belly and cracked beef bone in his iron pot with wild ginger and dried mountain angelica. Then he burned up the dense, fatty meal down to the last spoonful of marrow broth.
Within minutes, his closed vessel converted the nutrients into stored energy, refueling his upper and broad back muscles for tomorrow’s load.
Before retiring, he took down the two rawhide bracers from the wall.
He removed each of the twelve high-carbon steel flying needles, inspecting their three-sided armor-piercing tips. None had sustained damage. But the winter dampness had begun to bead up on the steel facets. He dipped a square of linen into rendered wolf fat and coated each needle in a barely noticeable layer of clean animal fat.
He slotted the twelve bodkins back into their rawhide friction channels. He tested the release tab against the heel of his palm.
Click. Snap.
The needles released smoothly, sliding out without catching on the rawhide edges.
He retrieved the Black Mountain Whetstone from his pack, poured three drops of well water across the dark stone, and laid the blade flat against the stone to inspect the edge.
Under the starlight, the cloudy carbon steel edge gleamed with specular perfection, free of tiny burrs.
The weapon was now an extension of the vessel’s shape.
Tomorrow, the foundation would support the next physical leap: the threshold of Flesh Forging.