The seventh man died in silence.
He crouched in the narrow two-foot gap between forty sacks of millet and the cold granite fire-wall. The raider was trembling so wildly that his iron knife rattled against the stone mortar. He heard no footstep approaching. He smelled only the sudden, cold metal scent of sheep fat.
A hand—heavy as a stone quarry block, its fingers coated in thick, horn-hard—reached into the crevice.
The hand seized the man’s throat. He clamped his windpipe before a scream could form in his throat cords.
Pei Jing didn’t waste a saber swing in the cramped space.
With a four-hundred-and-twenty-pound clamping force of his right hand, he twisted his wrist ninety degrees.
CRACK.
The seventh man’s thyroid joint padding and neck bones fractured cleanly under the spinning shear. The man went limp, his iron knife slipping from nerveless fingers to thump harmlessly onto the cedar planks.
Pei Jing released the body, letting it slide into the shadows between the sacks.
That left the eighth man.
Pei Jing turned back toward the central aisle.
Fifteen paces away, near the entrance of the flour storage room, lay the motionless body he had noted earlier. The man lay sprawled face-down beneath an overturned flour barrel, white powder dusted thick over his shoulders and hair like a shroud of snow.
Around the body lay a dark pool of spilled blood from Iron Calf’s cut artery.
To an untrained eye, the man was dead. A casualty of the first slaughter, crushed beneath falling barrels.
Pei Jing walked toward the body.
His boots made no sound on the wet wood. The three-foot mountain saber was held low at his right thigh. Its point dripping was dark crimson onto the flour-dusted planks.
Pei Jing crossed the threshold of the flour room. Then, three paces from the prone figure, his outer vision tracked a strange flaw.
The white dust on the man’s back was shifting.
It was a tiny back-and-forth swing: three tiny fractions of an inch up, three tiny fractions of an inch down, occurring every four seconds.
The lungs were expanding. The automatic nervous system was maintaining oxygenation. Meanwhile, the conscious brain waited for the precise moment of tactical overextension.
Pei Jing didn’t stop. He took a measured step past the fallen figure, deliberately exposing his back to the prone corpse as if checking the dark doorway ahead.
The trap was sprung.
The man beneath the flour exploded from the floorboards like a coiled pit viper.
He wasn’t an ordinary thug. He was Black Dog Xue. Hu Biao’s personal assassin, a wiry killer who had survived seven executions by feigning death among butcher carcasses.
In his right hand gleamed a ten-inch serrated gutting dagger, forged from imported black iron, its edge carved with jagged shark-tooth serrations designed to rip muscle wrapping and tear kidney tissue beyond razor-sharp repair.
Xue lunged from the floor with the full moving thrust of his legs. She drove the serrated steel straight toward Pei Jing’s chest spine.
“Die!” Xue hissed.
Pei Jing didn’t dodge.
At eighteen inches of separation, attempting to pivot on flour-slick floorboards carried a twenty percent risk of a slip that would compromise his base.
He engaged his body defenses.
At one-tenth of a split second before the steel met his skin, Pei Jing expelled all air from his lungs in a sharp, deep-throated hiss.
His rhomboids, upper back muscle, and broad back muscles fired at the same time.
SCHLICK-SCRAPE.
The serrated black dagger struck Pei Jing’s back horizontally, four inches below the nape of his neck.
The blade cut through his linen tunic and sliced into his flesh, carving a nine-inch level furrow across the muscular expanse of his upper back from the left shoulder blade to the right rib cage.
The shark-tooth serrations tore through the outer skin layer.
The blade bit through the dense, slate-grey rhino-leather skin, parting the deep skin and slicing into the superficial fibers of the upper back muscle.
Then, the blade stopped.
It didn’t reach the rib bones. It didn’t touch the upper-back bones.
Under the overwhelming automatic command of Tier 3 Flesh Forging, Pei Jing’s back muscles acted as an active living vise.
The cross-woven muscle strands—braided like steel wire cables—tightened with over six hundred pounds of lateral clamping force.
The striated muscle bundles squeezed shut around the flat of the ten-inch dagger. He clamped the serrated metal in an iron grip that locked still the blade in three tiny fractions of an inch of tissue.
Black Dog Xue’s arm jolted to a dead halt.
The assassin pulled back with both hands, his facial veins bulging, but the dagger didn’t budge. It was as if he had driven his weapon into a solid block of seasoned oak.
“What... What kind of monster are you?” Xue gasped.
Pei Jing didn’t look back.
The spark tracking data of pain flooded his central nervous system—a searing, hot tear across nine inches of dorsal tissue. He categorized the data. Superficial muscular jagged cut, tiny blood vessel bleeding clamped by reflex blood-vessel constriction, zero skeletal involvement, zero pleural breach.
A non-fatal working expense.
Pei Jing pivoted on the ball of his left foot.
Gale Saber: Form Nine, Full-Arc Reverse Spin.
His seventy-nine-two-pound frame rotated three hundred and sixty degrees in sixty split seconds.
The outward-pulling driving force of his turn pulled the dagger out of his back with a wet, squelching sound as the three-foot mountain saber swept around his hip in a blinding, level circle.
SHIIIK.
The thirty-six-inch high-carbon edge struck Black Dog Xue’s neck at twenty-nine meters per second.
There was zero pushback.
The assassin’s head parted from his shoulders in a clean, specular cleave. It spun upward into the dark rafters before crashing through an empty flour sack, coating the cut face in white dust.
The headless body stood for one second, fingers still curled in the shape of a dagger grip, then crashed forward into the flour with a dull, final thud.
Silence dropped over the South River Grain Depot.
Outside, the thunderstorm was beginning to roll eastward, the heavy thunder fading into a low, distant grumble over the southern hills. Cold rain continued to drum steadily against the slate roof. But the violent wind had dropped.
Pei Jing stood alone in the dark aisle.
Eight bodies lay scattered across the pine floorboards. It was surrounded by pools of dark bright red blood and white flour dust.
The four hundred sacks of grain stood untouched, dry, and undamaged. Not a single sulfur torch had ignited. Not a single drop of pitch had burned.
Pei Jing reached around his shoulder with his left hand, touching his back.
His fingers came away slick with dark crimson blood.
The jagged cut was nine inches long, spanning horizontally across his shoulder blades. But the bleeding had already slowed to a sluggish ooze. His cross-woven muscle fibers remained clamped in locked-muscle contraction, pinching the cut arterioles shut like razor-sharp metal tongs.
His floating sight screen activated in sharp, gold-bordered monospace:
Pei Jing read the tracking data with cold composure.
A permanent silver scar.
In corporate restructuring, when a toxic asset was liquidated under emergency conditions, the balance sheet often kept an accounting entry. A write-down footnote that served as an institutional warning for future clerks.
This nine-inch scar was his physical footnote. It would remind him for the rest of his life that a corpse in a combat zone was an unchecked debt until checked by a cut neck-artery.
He walked over to the open water cask beside the grain scales.
He drew a wooden bucket of cold, clear rain runoff.
He stripped off the blood-soaked linen tunic, exposing his slate-grey torso to the cold air.
He took the bucket with both hands and poured the freezing water directly over his back and shoulders.
SPLASH.
The icy water washed away the blood, flour, and black grime, stinging the open edges of the nine-inch wound. Pei Jing didn’t wince.
He reached into his canvas pouch, retrieved a handful of coarse grey stone salt and a dollop of rendered wolf fat. Then he rubbed the mixture directly into the raw flesh of the jagged cut.
The salt burned like liquid fire, sterilizing the wound against gangrenous bacterial infection and stimulating immediate fibrin clotting.
He took a roll of clean, dry linen bandage from his pack. He wrapped it firmly across his chest and shoulders four times, binding the wound edges together under high crushing tension.
Before sheathing the three-foot mountain saber, he set the Black Mountain Whetstone on a clean grain sack. Then he drew the rinsed steel across the dark stone five times on each side, truing the edge before resting the weapon in its pigskin sword sheath. He put on a clean wool tunic and walked among the fallen bodies.
He conducted a post-engagement asset recovery.
He knelt beside each corpse, turning out their leather pouches and inner pockets. From Scarface Qian’s belt, he pulled out a heavy pigskin purse clinking with silver. From Iron Calf and the six thugs, he recovered copper strings and minor silver metal bars. In total, the eight dead men yielded twenty-four silver coins of liquid coin. The payoff advanced by the Zhao Clan to finance the arson.
He gathered their weapons: eight knives, two bows, and the four unlit pitch jars, stacking them neatly by the loading door.
The night was ending.
The balance sheet was reconciled.