Dawn broke over the Cloudford River in shades of wet slate and pale iron.
The violent thunder had rolled east toward the country capital. That left only a fine, freezing drizzle that pattered softly against the cedar shingles of the South River Grain Depot. Along the water’s edge, thin ribbons of white mist drifted across the dark surface of the river. It curled around the sodden oak wooden support posts like funeral incense.
Pei Jing stepped out onto the rear timber loading platform.
He had spent the final hour before sunrise conducting a systematic site cleanup.
Inside the warehouse, the four hundred sacks of coarse millet, yellow soybeans, and wheat flour remained fully flawless, dry and fragrant in their burlap casings. The four unlit jars of rock-oil pitch and the sulfur torches had been carried outside, stacked against the river rail where any accidental starting would vent harmlessly into the water.
On the loading deck, eight corpses lay in a neat, uniform row.
Pei Jing had hauled each body out by the collar, arranging them side by side on the wet cedar planks like felled spruce logs awaiting transport to a sawmill.
Their hands were folded over their chests. Their weapons—eight butcher knives, two short recurve bows, and an iron crowbar—lay in a tidy pile at their feet. At the head of the row rested the cut head of Scarface Qian. Its features washed was pale by the cold rain, the snarl frozen into dead muscle.
Pei Jing sat on an empty cedar salt barrel beside the loading doors.
His three-foot mountain saber rested horizontally across his thighs.
The weapon’s high-carbon edge had sustained three tiny notches from heavy contact with iron belt buckles and the pry-bar’s hardened edge, reducing its cutting strength to ninety-four point two percent. He drew his thumb lightly along the flats. He felt the tiny burrs where the metal had yielded under straight-across shear. The Black Mountain whetstone in his side pouch would need forty minutes of water-lubricated sharpening at twenty-two degrees tonight to restore the main edge. Tool upkeep was not an aesthetic pursuit. It was the baseline payoff cost of staying alive in a border county where steel was expensive and human life was cheap.
Across his back, beneath a clean coarse linen shirt requisitioned from an unsealed warehouse bundle, the nine-inch level jagged cut was bound tight with alternating strips of rawhide and boiled linen.
The wound throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache—the living tracking data of blood-vessel repair. His Tier 5 rhino-leather skin and cross-woven muscle fibers held the jagged cut closed under natural water-pressure tension. That kept the edges from yawning open during hard effort. The coarse salt and rendering of boiled wolf fat packed into the tissue burned with clean, sterile heat, suppressing bacterial suppuration before it could take root in the fat under the skin.
His living fuel reserves were empty. The nonstop ninety-minute skirmish, combined with the explosive anaerobic bursts of the Gale Saber, had burned an estimated four thousand kilocalories. His stomach grumbled with hollow insistence, signaling an urgent living supply order for dense animal proteins and roasted root starches. Every gram of repair tissue demanded concrete material input. The cheat panel provided gaining speed, not ex nihilo creation.
Footsteps echoed from the river wharf path.
Rapid, heavy, wild footsteps splashing through freezing puddles.
Pei Jing didn’t draw his blade. His ears tracked the rhythm: one heavy, uneven gait dragging an old ankle injury, with five lighter, uncoordinated strides.
Pei Hongcheng rounded the corner of the cedar wall at a dead sprint.
Behind the Third Elder ran Cao Dun. He grabbed his eight-foot hunting spear. He was followed by four second-branch miners armed with iron pry-bars and pitchforks. Their faces were grey with panic, their clothes soaked through with freezing rainwater. They had run three li from the foundry without stopping, expecting to find the night sky ablaze with forty tons of burning grain.
Hongcheng skidded to a halt on the wet planks.
The four miners slammed into one another behind him. Their iron bars lowered as their eyes took in the scene.
Nobody spoke.
The only sound was the heavy, wheezing gasps of the miners and the steady drip of cold rainwater from the warehouse roof.
The grain depot stood intact, dark, silent, and undamaged.
And on the loading platform, laid out in cold and exact posture before the closed doors, were eight corpses of the Black Tiger Gang’s elite raiding squad.
Cao Dun’s single eye widened until the veins showed crimson against the white. He dropped his hunting spear. The iron point clattered against the timber deck with a ringing sound that seemed impossibly loud.
“Scarface Qian...” Cao Dun whispered, pointing a trembling hand at the cut head. “Iron Calf... Black Dog Xue... The entire river squad...”
The miners stared at the bodies, then at Pei Jing.
Their breath caught in their throats. These were the men who had terrorized the South River docks for five years. Cutthroats who had drowned escort drivers, burned rival barges, and beaten tax collectors to death in broad daylight.
They were stacked here like timber.
Pei Hongcheng walked forward slowly. His heavy work boots made wet, sucking sounds on the rain-slick planks.
The Third Elder’s face was pale, his long bamboo tobacco pipe gripped so tightly in his right fist that the knuckles showed white through his soot-stained skin. He stopped three paces from Pei Jing. His eyes traveled from the row of dead men to the blood-soaked linen binding visible beneath his son’s torn collar.
“Jing’er,” Hongcheng rasped. His voice shook with an emotion he had never revealed in forty years of labor. A terrifying mixture of paternal grief, disbelief, and deep, awe-struck respect. “You... Took them all?”
“Eight hostiles entered the outer edge with sulfur and pitch,” Pei Jing replied. His tone was as level, calm, and measured as a clerk reading property deeds. “The objective was arson. All eight assets were liquidated before starting could occur.”
He reached into his coat, pulled out a heavy pigskin purse. Then he tossed it into his father’s callused hands.
The purse struck Hongcheng’s palms with a heavy, metal clink.
“Twenty-four silver coins recovered from the raiders’ personal accounts,” Pei Jing said. “Twelve silver coins belong to the second branch. Use it to purchase winter coal for the miners and repair the bloomery kilns.”
He touched his own belt. There, the leftover twelve silver coins rested alongside his last savings.
“Twelve silver coins I retain as working commission for medicine and provisions.”
Hongcheng looked down at the heavy purse of silver, then at the eight dead cutthroats, and finally into the dark, unbending eyes of his sixteen-year-old son.
The boy who had been declared a barren vessel eight years ago—the boy whose bones had been broken in a gutter three months prior—sat before him like a solitary iron sovereign head over a reconciled ledger.
“Hu Biao will know,” Hongcheng whispered, his voice dropping into the cold drizzle. “When these eight bodies are found, the Black Tiger Gang and the Zhao Clan will know that the Pei Clan has a blade that can sever them.”
“They already know,” Pei Jing said, standing up from the salt barrel.
His seventy-nine-two-pound frame rose with smooth, unrushed power. The nine-inch wound across his shoulder blades pulled against the linen wraps. It sent a sharp pulse of tracking data through his nerves. But his spine remained straight as an iron plummet.
He walked to the edge of the wharf. His gaze lifted past the swollen grey waters of the Cloudford River.
To the north, the clouds were breaking.
Above the dark timberline of the Black Pine Forest, the jagged granite peaks of Mount Cang caught the first rays of morning sunlight. It shone like blades of cold silver against the pale blue sky.
Beyond those peaks lay the vast territories of Azure Province, the martial escort routes, the royal guard posts, and the borderlands where rogue fighters walked among mortals.
His floating sight screen activated for the foundational stage audit. It glowed in brilliant, rock-steady gold monospace:
Pei Jing rested his hand on the handle knob of his mountain saber.
The first fiscal quarter of his transmigration was officially closed.
He had started with a fractured collar bone, eight copper cash, and zero spiritual roots. Total insolvency in a world ruled by strength.
Through eighty-five days of deliberate, unbending compound interest, he had piled up an armored skin, striated muscle cables of eight-hundred-pound lifting power, an unnotched saber art, and the sovereignty of his own ground.
The debt had been paid. The capital had been secured.
“The books are balanced, Father,” Pei Jing said. He turned his face toward the cold northern wind.
“Now, we build the surplus.”