Seventy days of compounding turned living tissue into high-pulling cable.
At the fourth watch of the morning, the freezing mist hung motionless in the ravine of Cold Spring Creek, three li north of Cloudford Town. Pei Jing stood stripped to his waist on a shelf of frozen flaky rock. His breath condensed into steady, rhythmic jets of white vapor.
He raised his right arm, clenching his fist.
Beneath the slate-grey rhino-leather skin, the muscle fibers of his forearm and bicep bunched with the clockwork thickness of braided steel wire. There was no excess adipose tissue. His body fat percentage hovered at six percent. But his hollows were packed with dense, cross-woven muscle strands.
Striking speed was constrained by two body bottlenecks: the recruitment latency of fast-twitch Type IIx motor units and the antagonistic co-contraction of opposing muscle groups. An untrained warrior attempting to swing a heavy blade instinctively tightened their biceps and triceps at the same time, fighting their own musculoskeletal system and bleeding forty percent of their potential speed.
Under the forced body rebuilding of Flesh Forging Tier 2, those bottlenecks had been systematically dismantled.
The enemy muscles relaxed fully during the gaining speed phase. He allowed the agonist fibers—the broad back muscles, pectoralis major, and side-rib muscles—to contract with explosive, uninhibited torque.
Over the past ten days, he had ingested the two jars of medicine purchased from Su Mei’er. The Refined Tiger-Bone Paste and the Deer-Horn Gelatin Essence.
His closed vessel—the fine china bottle that allowed zero internal energy to fade—had broken down the packed animal connective tissue and calcium hydroxyapatite with ninety-nine percent smooth speed. The amino acids had cross-linked the actin and myosin filaments of his muscle bellies. Meanwhile, the stone salts had thickened the outer-brain bone walls of his radius, forearm bone, and upper arm bone.
He summoned the Ledger’s morning audit:
“Tier Two Competent,” Pei Jing said quietly.
With Tier 2 Flesh Forging, his lifting capacity had climbed past six hundred and fifty pounds. More importantly, his neuromuscular response latency—the delay between motor cortex firing and maximum contractile force—had dropped from the human baseline of two hundred split seconds down to one hundred and ten split seconds.
He was moving twice as fast as an ordinary mortal.
Now came the cutting audit.
Ten paces ahead, growing out of a cleft in the granite creek bank, stood a grove of wild iron-joint bamboo.
In Azure Province, iron-joint bamboo was prized by weapon crafters and cursed by woodcutters. Its stalks grew three stories tall, four inches thick, with walls half an inch of solid, stringy plant fiber soaked with tiny quartz dust crystals. Struck with an ordinary iron wood-axe. Then, the blade bounced with a ringing shock, shedding sparks without piercing past the green rind.
Before Pei Jing stood a cluster of five iron-joint bamboo stalks.
They grew in a tight, slanted line along the creek bank, each four inches in width, spaced three to four inches apart from one another.
To sever a single iron-joint bamboo needed a sharp blade and clean edge posture.
To sever five live bamboo stalks in a single nonstop stroke needed something fundamentally different. Overwhelming cutting speed, zero yaw variance across thirty inches of target space, and enough follow-through driving force to overcome the cumulative high-pressure drag of five dense plant fiber walls.
Pei Jing rested his left hand on the pigskin sword sheath of the three-foot mountain saber at his hip.
His thumb pressed against the iron guard, pushing the blade out by half an inch.
Click.
The polished carbon-steel core caught the cold morning light.
He widened his stance. His left foot rested forward on the frozen shale, sixty percent of his weight anchored over his rear right heel. His balance point sank three inches. His pelvis tucked to lock his lower-back bones into an unbending torque transmitter.
He started the mental math:
Target width: twenty-eight inches of combined target hall. Pushback: five stalks of four-inch iron-joint bamboo. Plant fiber cross-section: about sixty square inches of quartz dust-impregnated fiber. Needed blade speed: minimum twenty-five meters per second. Permissible edge angle variance: less than zero point two degrees.
If the blade twisted by even half a degree while cutting the third stalk, the lateral drag against the eight-pound saber would wildly slow down the steel, wedging the weapon in the fourth stalk and sending a bone-jarring blast wave back into his forearm.
Pei Jing closed his eyes.
One breath.
Two breaths.
His eyes snapped open.
Gale Saber: Form Four, Sweeping Willow Draw.
He moved.
His rear foot drove into the frozen rock with enough force to pulverize the surface lichen.
The clockwork wave traveled up his calf, locked his right hip. Then it whipped his torso through a sixty-degree level rotation in forty split seconds.
His right hand ripped the three-foot saber from the pigskin sheath.
SHIIIING.
The sound report was not a roar. It was a piercing, high-pitched hiss—the sound of eight pounds of carbon-steel laminate speeding up past eighty miles per hour in under twelve inches of draw travel.
The saber carved a flat, level crescent parallel to the granite ground, exactly three feet above the roots.
THWIP-THWIP-THWIP.
The sound of the five impacts tightly packed into a single, nonstop sound tear, resembling a sheet of oiled silk ripped across a tailor’s knee.
The blade whistled through the first stalk. Sliced the second. Parted the third. Snapped the fourth. Split the fifth.
The saber completed its rotation, stopping dead three inches outside the fifth stalk. It was locked in place by the sudden, total contraction of Pei Jing’s left pectoralis and right broad back muscles.
Pei Jing didn’t shift his feet.
He stood in his low power stance. He held the eight-pound saber stationary in his right hand.
Ahead of him, the five iron-joint bamboo stalks remained standing.
They didn’t tip. They didn’t groan. The leafy crowns, thirty feet above, swayed gently in the mountain breeze as though nothing had touched their roots.
Three seconds passed.
A sudden gust of freezing wind drafted down the ravine from the high snowfields.
Crack.
The tops of all five bamboo stalks shifted at the same time.
The upper twenty feet of all five stalks slid diagonally off their stumps in perfect, timed together posture, tumbling into the frozen gravel of the creek bed with a heavy, crashing clatter of shattering branches.
CRASH.
Pei Jing walked forward and inspected the stumps.
All five cuts were located at the exact same level plane: thirty-six inches above the flaky rock base.
He ran his thumb across the cut face of the center bamboo stalk.
The plant fiber fibers were cut with atom-deep care. The quartz dust crystals had not shattered. They had been snapped cleanly in two. That left a cut surface so specular and polished that the morning frost could find no texture to grip.
He raised the mountain saber to his eyes.
The thirty-six-inch blade was unnotched. Along the cloudy hard steel core, there was no bending, no micro-chipping, and no residue of bamboo sap. The speed had been so extreme that the plant fluid had not had time to adhere to the steel.
The floating sight screen flashed with gold-bordered monospace slate:
Pei Jing lowered the saber.
“Five stalks split in eighty split seconds,” he noted. “Power delivery optimal.”
With Tier 2 Flesh Forging and Tier 2 Gale Saber, his single-strike lethality had surpassed the defensive threshold of common mortal armor. A warrior wearing boiled ox hide or iron layered-scale armor would be cut at the waist before their nervous system could transmit the impulse to block.
He returned to the West Pavilion to prepare his expedition kit.
He took out the Black Mountain Whetstone, wiping its dark rock face with well water. He set the mountain saber across the stone, executing twenty light passes on each side to ensure the apex of the edge kept its nineteen-degree shape. He inspected his grandfather’s ash recurve bow. He rubbed fresh animal fat into the three-ply hemp string until the cord was supple and impervious to freezing moisture.
He checked the seven iron broadhead arrows, filing the bevels of each three-sided head to shaving sharpness.
In his food pouch, he packed three pounds of dried salt beef and four cakes of baked millet flour—roughly eight thousand calories of emergency fuel to sustain his core heat during high-sky tracking.
He looked north toward the jagged granite crags of Mount Cang. There, the dark line of the Black Pine Forest met the snow-covered peaks.
Somewhere in those rocky ravines, the Two-Tailed Wild Boar was rooting through the frozen earth.
Six hundred pounds of monster meat. Fourteen inches of dense ivory.
The tool was tested. The muscle was forged.
It was time to collect the asset.