Pharmaceutical chemistry was an uncompromising discipline.
In the drafty kitchen shed of the West Pavilion, an iron cooking pot rested over a slow bed of oak embers. The liquid inside was pitch-black, thick as molasses. It bubbled with a slow, thick, sticky rhythm that released an aroma of bitter earth, bitter pine-resin, and animal musk.
Pei Jing sat on a low stool of split pine, a notched bamboo stick in his right hand.
Every fifteen minutes, he stirred the pot twelve times clockwise. He scraped the bottom of the iron vessel to keep the settled mud from scorching against the heat.
On the wooden bench beside him lay the empty healing wrappers from Fragrant Cloud Pavilion.
The formula was the ancient military Bone-Strengthening Marrow Decoction.
Its main active agent was Radix Aconiti. Raw wild aconite harvested from the shaded limestone cliffs of Mount Cang. In its raw botanical state, aconite was a lethal poison. Its tissues were soaked with aconitine. That diterpene alkaloid numbed neural signal channels and locked muscular channels in the open position, causing fatal heart flutter, breathing total numbness, and heart arrest within forty minutes of ingestion.
However, organic chemistry obeyed heat laws.
By subjecting the aconite root to nonstop boiling at ninety-eight degrees for four hours, the ester bonds of the toxic diester alkaloids underwent hydrolysis. The aconitine degraded into benzoylaconine and aconine. Compounds that possessed less than one-hundredth of the parent molecule’s toxicity. But kept its deep living properties: intense coronary vasodilation, outer tiny blood vessel spreading, and the stimulation of deep osteogenic bone marrow synthesis.
To this hydrolyzed aconite base, Pei Jing had added four ounces of deer-horn gelatin essence, a bundle of wild mountain ginseng rootlets, and two dried gallbladders of mountain pit vipers to act as bio-enhancers.
The gelatin acted as an emulsifying colloid, encapsulating the rich fat-soluble diterpenes and allowing them to bypass the stomach’s destructive gastric acid, delivering the active alkaloids directly to the intestinal brush border where absorption occurred at near one hundred percent smooth speed.
The financial cost of this single cooking pot was four silver coins.
Pei Jing reached into his inner pocket, feeling the coins that remained in his leather pouch.
One silver coin. Two hundred copper cash.
His liquid reserve had shrunk from six silver coins down to one silver coin in twenty days.
The arithmetic of training was brutally simple. Higher realms burned up capital at an exponential rate. Skin Tempering could be sustained on butcher pork fat and coarse millet, costing a few hundred copper cash a month. Flesh Forging Tier 2 and Tier 3 demanded rare botanical alkaloids, packed animal gelatin, and wild monster essence costing dozens of silver coins per cycle.
If his capital hit zero, the Daily Accumulation Ledger would freeze.
Worse, attempting to train at Tier 2 Flesh Forging without dense healing tonics would force his body into negative body-energy balance, catabolizing its own load-bearing marrow to maintain muscular thickness.
“Current liquid runway: seven days,” Pei Jing murmured. “Running at an extreme financial deficit.”
He dipped a thin sliver of dry pine into the cooking pot, lifted it. Then he tasted a single droplet with the tip of his tongue.
The liquid was bitter, astringent, and heavy.
A faint numbness prickled the papillae of his tongue, fading within ten seconds into a clean, deep warmth that radiated down his pharynx.
Hydrolysis was ninety-nine percent complete. The lethal aconitine had degraded into healing benzoylaconine.
He lifted the heavy iron pot from the trivet with his bare hands. The boiling iron burned at over one hundred degrees. But the slate-grey rhino-leather skin on his palms absorbed the heat flux without blistering.
He poured the thick black liquor through a clean linen filter into a glazed clay bowl.
He drank.
The decoction was hot, sliding down his throat-pipe like molten resin. It tasted of bitter medicine, roasted horn, and rotten-egg earth.
Within ninety seconds of ingestion, the body reaction began.
It didn’t remain in his stomach. The bioavailable alkaloids and animal connective tissue surged into his bloodstream, carried by the intense vasodilation directly into the nutrient arteries of his long bones.
A deep, throbbing heat blossomed inside his marrow cavities.
In his femurs, humeri, and vertebral column, the deep bone-building marrow multiplied rapidly, stimulated by the aconine compounds. Deep inside his outer-brain bone walls, calcium and phosphate ions bonded into tiny crystal-clear lattices, preparing his skeletal frame to withstand the crushing contractile torque of Tier 3 Flesh Forging.
His collar bone—once fractured in the muddy alley—throbbed with deep, healing medicine warmth as its internal layered-scale bone stonework thickened into an unbending stone sleeve.
His floating sight screen activated with steady monospace characters:
Pei Jing exhaled. The breath carried the sharp, healing odor of boiled aconite.
“The engine is fueled for forty-eight hours,” he said. He set the empty clay bowl onto the bench. “Now, the capital must be replenished.”
He returned to his sleeping quarters and began his final pre-deployment inventory.
First: the main weapon.
The three-foot mountain saber was drawn from its pigskin sword sheath. He inspected the hard steel core along the Black Mountain Whetstone, applying three drops of sheep fat to the polished edge. The edge gleamed with specular perfection, sharp enough to part silk in mid-air.
Second: the hidden defense assets.
He inspected the two rawhide bracers strapped to his forearms. Twelve high-carbon spring steel needles were seated in their friction channels, each three-sided needle-point arrow point coated in animal fat. He bent his wrists backward twenty degrees, testing the horn release tabs.
Click. Snap.
The release was instant, silent, and clean.
Third: the distance asset.
He strung the sixty-pound ash recurve bow, checking the horn nocks and the three-ply beeswaxed hemp string. In the quiver were seven broadhead arrows, their iron tips sharpened to needle sharpness.
Fourth: field gear.
He packed the five-inch antler-handled skinning knife into his right boot, wrapped the eight-inch Black Mountain Whetstone in an oiled rawhide cloth and stowed it in his canvas pack. Then he tied a coiled thirty-foot length of braided hemp rope to his waist.
Lastly, three dried salt beef strips and four baked millet cakes went into his belt pouch—dense carbohydrates and sodium to maintain osmotic balance during sub-zero operations.
He dressed in his coarse wool tunic, cinched his hemp rope belt tight. Then he pulled a wolf-fur lined cowl over his head to shield his face from high-sky winds.
He unbarred the gate of the West Pavilion.
It was the fourth watch of the morning, two hours before dawn.
Cloudford Town lay buried under a silent sea of blue shadows and drifted snow. Not a dog barked. Not a night-soil cart rolled. The only sound was the dry, hissing whisper of the north wind scouring the slate roofs.
Pei Jing walked past the frozen smelting bloomeries of the second branch. The kilns were dark, the charcoal melted rock waste heaps covered in six inches of untouched snow. He passed the western under-road drain and stepped onto the mountain trail.
The height rose rapidly.
Within two hours, he had cleared the lower scrub hills and crossed the timberline of the Black Pine Forest. The air grew thin, cold, and razor-sharp, smelling of frozen granite and ancient cedar. Snowdrifts reached his knees. But his cross-woven thigh muscles drove through the crust with steady, high-pressure persistence. That left clean, deep furrows in the white slope.
He crossed the Frozen Horn Gorge, where icefalls hung sixty feet tall from the limestone overhangs like frozen glass organ pipes. The wind speed here sped up to ten meters per second, funneling down from the ice-slow peaks.
Pei Jing chewed a slice of dried salt beef, letting the spit moisten his throat.
Under his cowl, his eyes tracked the terrain using Trapper’s Sight.
At five thousand feet of height, the small game vanished. There were no snow grouse tracks, no hare runs. But on an exposed shelf of frozen flaky rock three hundred paces ahead, the dwarf juniper bushes had been shredded.
The woody branches, thick as broomsticks, were torn away at a height of three feet. Their bark stripped by was heavy, grinding back teeth.
Beside the ruined bushes lay a wallow. A ten-foot depression in the snow where an animal of huge bulk had scraped down to the frozen granite to rub its hide against sharp pink rock.
In the center of the wallow, frozen into a block of blue ice, was a tuft of coarse, wire-like black bristles.
Each bristle was eight inches long, as thick as a copper needle. Then he coated in a brittle casing of dried pine resin and powdered quartz gravel.
“Target confirmed,” Pei Jing said, his fingers tightening on the handle of his mountain saber. “Two-Tailed Boar.”
He checked the wind. The northern gale was blowing across the ridge from right to left at eight meters per second. If he approached from the lower scree, the updraft would carry his scent directly into the beast’s smell field. He had to circle three hundred paces around the western horn, taking the high ridge downwind.
He calculated the timeline: twenty minutes to cross the granite chimney, fifteen minutes to establish an ambush position overlooking the feeding trough.
He climbed onto the narrow granite spine above the wallow. He stepped silently across the packed blue ice, vanishing into the falling snow.