The air pressure plummeted across Cloudford Town at the fourth watch of the afternoon.
Heavy, bruised storm clouds—dark purple at their bellies and fringed with rotten-egg yellow vapor—rolled down from the northern peaks of Mount Cang, swallowing the winter sun. The wind along the Cloudford River shifted from a steady northern breeze to uneven, violent gusts that whipped cold spray off the grey water.
Pei Jing walked along the South River embankment, his cowl pulled low.
He didn’t carry his three-foot mountain saber openly. The weapon was disassembled from its baldric and wrapped inside an oily burlap grain sack slung across his shoulder like a porter’s sample.
He halted eighty paces from the South River Grain Depot.
He leaned against a stone mooring bollard, casually observing the warehouse structure while pretending to watch the barge traffic on the river.
The river was swelling rapidly. Meltwater from the early snows in the high peaks, combined with the incoming storm front, had raised the water level by three feet. The current was churning at three point five knots. It smashed ice floes against the granite wharf wooden support posts with hollow, repetitive booms.
The depot itself was a castle of seasoned timber and granite.
Built sixty years ago during the peak of Azure Province’s river trade, the warehouse was eighty paces long and thirty paces wide, built upon three-foot-thick pillars of dressed granite that raised the timber floor above seasonal spring floods. Its walls were five-inch cedar planks caulked with oakum and pine tar. Its roof was steeply pitched, covered in heavy grey mountain slates designed to shed three feet of winter snow.
Inside lay the lifeblood of the second branch: four hundred sacks of coarse millet, yellow soybeans, and dried wheat flour, totaling nearly forty tons of food.
Pei Jing conducted a stone-built vulnerability audit.
To the north, the warehouse faced South Canal Street. There, the town night watch kept an intermittent patrol with lanterns and brass gongs. The front entrance consisted of massive double doors of iron-heavy elm, barred from within by an eight-inch square oak beam. An assault from the street would need thirty minutes with an iron battering ram, alerting every dog within three li.
To the east, the depot shared a blind fire-wall of grey stone with the royal salt storehouse.
To the west, a narrow four-foot drainage alley ran between the depot and a row of abandoned fish-drying sheds. An ideal approach vector for infantry, but choked with frozen refuse and monitored by stray dogs.
That left the southern river wharf.
At the rear of the depot, facing the dark water, was a raised loading platform built over the wooden support posts. Flatboats and grain barges moored directly beneath the overhang to unload cargo via tackle blocks.
The rear loading doors were two four-foot timber leaves secured not by a drop-bar, but by an external iron sliding latch locked with a heavy bronze padlock.
To a skilled burglar or an arsonist carrying an iron crowbar, that padlock could be popped in twelve seconds of leverage.
Once inside, the internal layout was a tactical trap.
The four hundred grain sacks were stacked in ten-foot-high tiers. That created three long, narrow aisles barely four feet wide. A small team entering with torches would be channelized into those halls, unable to maneuver laterally.
And thirty feet above those aisles hung the load-bearing cedar roof beams: a web of heavy twelve-inch tie beams, collar ties, and roof beams supporting the slate roof.
In the shadows of those roof beams, human eyes adapted to torchlight could see nothing.
Pei Jing compiled the personnel threat profile in his mind based on Cao Dun’s field intelligence:
Leader: Scarface Qian. Age thirty-six. Former sergeant in the border penal battalions who had escaped after murdering his commanding officer. Realm: Flesh Forging Tier 2. Weapon: heavy iron-banded cleaver. Known for exceptional brutal endurance and a high limit for deep cuts.
Guards: Seven seasoned street fighters. Two carried iron-tipped recurve bows and sulfur arrows to ignite high rafters. Two carried iron crowbars and pitch jars. Three carried serrated butcher cleavers and boarding axes, hardened through dozens of gang clashes along the docks.
Total hostile force: eight armed combatants.
His floating sight screen activated with silent, monospace counts:
Pei Jing turned back toward the western alley.
His decision to exclude the Pei Clan guards was based on cold exact risk analysis.
If he alerted Patriarch Canghai and the First Branch, the elders would enter into frantic committee meetings. They would send an envoy to Judge Liu. Who was secretly a thirty percent equity holder in the arson trade ring. The judge would tip off Iron Claw Hu Biao. The raid would be canceled, only to be rescheduled three nights later. Just then, the guards were exhausted.
Worse, if he summoned the second branch miners, thirty armed laborers would clash with eight hardened cutthroats in the dark streets. Men would die. Blood feuds would escalate. The town constables would declare martial law and impound the warehouse as a disputed crime scene.
The grain would be lost anyway.
In financial auditing, when a corporate entity had toxic liabilities actively attempting to burn down the running public works, passive diplomacy was bankruptcy. The only rational remediation was razor-sharp forced payout.
“A collective defense creates coordination friction,” Pei Jing murmured. “A single worker eliminates all working leakage.”
He returned to the West Pavilion as the first heavy raindrops struck the tile roof edges.
The rain was freezing, mixed with pellets of soft hail that bounced across the frozen flat stone slabs. Thunder rumbled in the north—a deep, ground-shaking that shook the timber walls of his room.
Pei Jing entered the kitchen shed.
He built a roaring fire beneath the cooking pot.
He took three pounds of cured mutant boar meat, sliced it into thick ribbons. Then he threw it into the pot with four ladles of water, three spoonfuls of wild ginger balm, and a cup of coarse salt.
He burned up the boiling meat with wooden chopsticks, chewing through the dense, marbled fat and stringy muscle until his stomach was full.
To fight in sub-zero rain while suspended in freezing rafters needed massive heat-powered reserves. If blood sugar dipped, outer vasoconstriction would slow his finger reflexes, introducing a split-second delay to his needle release.
He sat cross-legged on his straw pallet, allowing his closed vessel to process the fuel.
The body-energy fire burned in his core.
His heart pumped warm, nutrient-dense blood into his cross-woven muscle fibers. His body heat remained locked at thirty-seven point two degrees, streaming a dry, clean heat that kept the cold dampness of the room from touching his skin.
At the second watch of the night—nine in the evening—the storm broke over Cloudford Town with full violence.
CRACK-BOOM.
A bolt of blue lightning struck the high ridge of Mount Cang, lighting up the window frames in blinding, strobe-like bright glare.
The rain turned pouring, drumming against the slate roofs with a hammering roar that swallowed all footstep sounds, all carriage clatter, and all human voices. The drainage canals in the alleys overflowed, rushing toward the river in grey torrents of icy mud.
Pei Jing opened his eyes.
He stood up.
He stripped off his outer tunic. He wrapped his torso in strips of dark, oiled linen that held his ribs tight and removed loose fabric that could snag on nails. He strapped the two rawhide bracers to his forearms, verifying that the twelve high-carbon steel needles rested clean in their friction slots.
He drew the three-foot mountain saber from its pigskin sword sheath. Before greasing the steel, he took the Black Mountain Whetstone from the table and gave each edge a dozen swift, dry strokes. The fine dark rock smoothed any micro-imperfections along the cutting apex with a crisp, muted scrape that vanished under the thunder outside.
He took a square of clean linen, dipped it in sheep fat. Then he wiped the blade from guard to tip.
The thin film of animal fat had two purposes. It prevented rainwater from oxidizing the hard steel core. It silenced the sound draw of the steel against the sword sheath mouth.
He slid the saber into his hemp belt, resting it diagonally across his lower back where the handle wouldn’t protrude above his shoulder.
He pulled a black wool cowl over his head, leaving only his dark, unblinking eyes exposed to the cold air.
He stepped out into the courtyard.
The pouring downpour battered his cowl, but his Tier 5 rhino-leather skin didn’t register the chill. He walked past the dead plum trees, crossed the breached western wall. Then he melted into the stormy darkness of Cloudford Town.
He navigated the flooded stone alleys with rhythmic, fluid strides, timing his forward steps to coincide with the periodic crashes of overhead thunder. By the time he reached the muddy river embankment, the water was sweeping across the wooden dock planks, black and frothing under the lightning. Ahead, the massive cedar dark shape of the South River Grain Depot stood like an unmoving mountain against the deluge.
The audit was moving to the river.