The cold mountain drizzle stopped half an hour before dawn. That left the flat stone slabs of the East Wing courtyard slick with grey river grease.
Pei Jing sat on a low wooden bench beside the stone well, stripped to the waist. His breath billowed in steady, pale plumes against the dim light, measured and slow. A wooden bucket sat between his feet, its surface skimmed with dark rainwater and flakes of dried blood.
In his left hand, he held coarse linen soaked in salt water. In his right, he gripped a short wooden ruler.
He brought the wet linen around his shoulder. He pressed it flat against the level jagged cut running nine inches across the muscles of his upper back. The pain was immediate and cold, biting through the sense receptors along his dorsal spine. His pulse didn’t elevate. His breathing remained fixed at seven cycles a minute. He had learned twenty-four days ago that flinching merely wasted body-energy glucose.
The serrated cleaver wielded by the cutthroat outside the grain warehouse had bitten deep, parting the skin and digging three-eighths of an inch into the upper back muscle before muscle fibers caught the steel. Under normal mortal biology, such a wound needed fifteen silk stitches, two pots of bitter balm, and forty days of bed rest.
Pei Jing tightened his shoulder blades.
Deep within the crimson striations of his back, the thick bundles of his flesh tightened. The myofibril cables, conditioned by sixty days of weight-bearing horse stances, clamped together like linked iron teeth. The edges of the wound drew inward. No fresh blood welled to the surface. Only a faint, clear fluid seeped into the linen, carrying away the grit of crushed warehouse brick.
He rinsed the cloth, wrung it dry until his knuckles whitened, and laid it across his knee.
Outside the high stone wall of the compound, thirty laborers were finishing the cleanup of the grain yard. Eight corpses, stripped of their iron knuckles, river-damp vests, and copper coins, had already been loaded onto a manure cart bound for the lime pits outside the west gate.
Pei Jing had audited the raid before sunrise. Eight men dead. One warehouse door scorched by pine pitch. Forty-two bushels of winter millet slightly dampened by leaking shingles. The Pei family’s defensive balance sheet had absorbed zero load-bearing loss.
He stood up from the bench. Two granite millstones lay stacked against the brick outer edge wall, each weighing one hundred and twenty jin. He reached down, sank his fingers into the square axle sockets chiseled into the rock, and hoisted both weights to his collarbones without bending his knees.
His stance settled into the deep horse stance. His thighs dropped parallel to the flat stone slabs. His heels pressed into the stone seams, rooting his skeletal frame into the granite foundation of Cloudford Town.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness of his skull, the countdown began.
Two hours. Deliberate, high-load muscular recruitment. The daily fuel of compound interest.
Water droplets struck the hot skin of his chest, hissed faintly, and ran downward over striated belly plates. Muscle burn began its burning crawl through the deep thigh muscles. Pei Jing lowered his balance point by a quarter of an inch. That forced the vastus medialis to carry the clockwork load.
The deep burn shifted from chemical fatigue into systemic heat. His blood surged through the blood-vessel networks of his forearms, swelling the veins until they stood out like thick purple cords wrapped around bronze rods.
At one hour and fifty-eight minutes, the heat packed along the nine-inch jagged cut across his upper back—the compact friction of living cables knitting under high-pressure squeezing.
Two hours struck.
Pei Jing set the granite millstones down. The base stone met the courtyard earth with a muted, heavy thud that displaced not a single loose pebble.
He exhaled a long column of hot grey mist.
In his eye field, etched across the dark slate of his vision, the cold monospace characters lit up with clean, unblinking clarity:
The stone-slate screen stayed for three seconds before dissolving into his visual periphery.
Across his upper back, the deep jagged cut tightened with a faint, rubbery snap. He reached behind his neck to trace the wound with his index finger. Then, his nail met a hard, raised seam of pale silver tissue, flat as an iron rivet and insensitive to the cold wind.
The Limit-Break of Flesh Forging had arrived on schedule. Sixty days of deliberate sweat. Six hundred hours of clockwork load. Under body stress, the striated fibers could lock into a rigid matrix, arresting heavy bleeding within seconds and preventing blades from piercing deeper than superficial muscle tissue.
Then the body-energy debt hit him.
It was a hollow empty pocket inside his gastric lining, sudden and starving, as if an internal fire had burned up its last coal and was preparing to burn the boiler walls. Synthesizing dense connective tissue and repairing damaged muscle in ten days carried a total chemical price. The Ledger demanded its balance settled in calories.
Pei Jing pulled a coarse charcoal-grey linen robe over his shoulders, tied his sharkskin belt tight around his waist to compress his aching stomach. Then he walked toward the kitchen quarters.
The kitchen was thick with steam from boiling bone broth and woodsmoke.
Aunt Fang stood before the great iron cooking pots, her indigo apron flour-dusted and her grey hair pinned back with a horn pin. She turned as the latch clicked, holding a wide wooden ladle dripping with pale yellow animal fat.
“Third Master,” she said, her voice hushed with the lingering fear of the midnight alarms. “The pork is boiled. I skimmed the scum three times.”
“Thank you, Aunt Fang,” Pei Jing said, his voice low and dry. “Six pounds of the belly meat. Three bowls of salted turnip. Leave the fat on.”
She filled a broad wooden trencher with thick slabs of pale, steaming pork belly, with pickled mustard greens and three large bowls of boiled millet.
Pei Jing sat at the pine table in the pantry. He ate with clean, steady care, chewing each mouthful twelve times to ensure complete acid-burn breakdown before swallowing. The dense fats and connective tissue slid down his throat, hitting the acid of his stomach like dry kindling on glowing embers.
Within minutes, streaming heat spread from his epigastrium through his mesenteric arteries. The hollow ache in his ribs subsided. The chemical principal had been paid.
Heavy footsteps sounded in the outer hall. A boot sole scraped against the threshold.
Pei Hongcheng stepped into the kitchen pantry.
The clan patriarch looked older than his fifty-two years. His faded indigo coat was buttoned crookedly over his boiled-leather cuirass. The smell of bitter tobacco hung heavy in his grey beard. His right hip hitched slightly with every second step—the legacy of an iron spear point taken in the northern border guard posts twenty years ago.
In his left hand, he carried a square wooden box bound with twine. His right hand held his chipped cast-iron pipe.
“The county yamen court guards arrived at the south gate an hour ago,” Hongcheng said, his voice gravelly and worn thin. “Judge Chen sent two clerks. They wanted to inspect the warehouse.”
Pei Jing wiped his mouth with a linen cloth. “Did they enter?”
“No,” Hongcheng said. He tapped the cold bowl of his iron pipe against his thumbnail with a dull clack. “I gave them ten silver coins and three jars of pear wine. Told them river bandits tried the locks, and our guards drove them into the reeds. They took the wine. They didn’t ask to see the lime pits.”
Hongcheng sat down heavily, leaning his bad hip against the wall.
“Eight men, Jing’er,” the patriarch murmured, his bloodshot eyes searching Pei Jing’s dark gaze. “Eight blades from the Black Tiger Gang. Scar-Faced Liu wasn’t among them, but three of those cutthroats were dock regulars who have drowned tax collectors in the Yun River without blinking.”
“Their footwork was loose,” Pei Jing replied evenly. “Their blades were notched. They carried pine torches into an enclosed courtyard, destroying their own night vision. Their liabilities exceeded their margin.”
Hongcheng stared at him. The pipe bowl tapped against the table, once, twice.
“You talk like you’re auditing rusted horse shoes,” Hongcheng whispered. “Hu Biao won’t audit. The River-Cleaver has run the waterfront for fifteen years. Patriarch Zhao pays him two hundred silver coins a year to ensure our iron ore never reaches the canal barges on time. Now you have killed eight of his men in our yard.”
“If we had let them burn the grain,” Pei Jing said, his voice flat as dark rock, “the clan would have had forty days of food leftover. By the eleventh month, we would have had to sell the deed to Shaft Two to Zhao Cangshan for twenty cents on the string. We would have starved by the winter solstice. Deficits can’t be reasoned with, father. They must be settled in full.”
Hongcheng closed his eyes and let out a long, wheezing sigh that smelled of tobacco ash. He pushed the square wooden box across the table.
Pei Jing untied the cord and lifted the cedar lid. Inside lay twelve heavy silver metal bars stamped with the royal seal of the Azure Province treasury, each weighing one liang, alongside three rolls of copper cash on oiled twine.
“Your monthly pay from the clan treasury,” Hongcheng said quietly. “Twelve silver coins. It was supposed to go to the First Branch for winter coal. I gave it to you. If you need grain, buy it. If you need herbs, talk to the woman at the Vast Treasure Pavilion. But don’t walk the docks alone.”
“Understood,” Pei Jing said. He closed the box.
Hongcheng stood up, his joints popping dryly. He turned to leave, then paused at the door. “Your back. Aunt Fang said you took a blade.”
“It closed,” Pei Jing said.
Hongcheng stayed silent for a moment, then stepped through the door into the morning light. His pipe bowl tapped rhythmically against his boot down the hall.
Pei Jing carried the box back to the East Wing. Beneath a loose floorboard under his cot, he placed the silver alongside his leftover cash. Total liquid reserve: thirty silver coins, four thousand two hundred copper coins.
He took his notched pig-iron mountain chopper from the corner. He laid it upon the low table beside his box-shaped slab of dense dark rock—the Black Mountain Whetstone.
He poured three drops of tea oil onto the blade. Then he drew the stone along the edge in long, steady, metronomic strokes.
The sound was a dry, nonstop scrape of stone on metal. Two deep notches had formed near the sweet spot of the blade where he had split through the collarbone of the sixth cutthroat. Iron against bone always pulled out a fee. A weapon of cheap pig iron couldn’t sustain the striking force his muscles now generated.
He sharpened the edge for twenty minutes until the main edge was clean, wiped the slurry away with a rag. Then he set the chopper aside.
It was time.
Pei Jing walked to the center of his room. He removed his outer grey robe, standing in only his loose cotton trousers.
In his mind’s eye, the second ledger record of the day waited:
Python Tendon-Stretching Stance. Tier 1 Novice: 0.0%.
He dropped his right foot backward, turning the heel forty-five degrees outward. His left leg extended forward, knee locked, toes gripping the floorboards like eagle talons. He rotated his pelvis, twisting his spine thirty degrees to the left while reaching both arms in opposite directions along an unnatural, spiraling slanted plane.
The strain hit his hip capsule instantly.
It wasn’t the burning fatigue of muscle fibers. It was the deep, cold tension of dense connective tissue being pulled to the total boundary of body limit. The tendons running from his heel up through the hamstring, across the sacrum, and into the contralateral broad back muscles went taut as drawn siege-engine cables.
Pei Jing locked his breath in his chest muscle.
Five minutes into the hold, a muffled sound echoed from deep within his left hip socket—a distinct, heavy thwack, like the dry shell of a hazelnut cracking under an iron boot heel.
The joint didn’t dislocate. The joint cord had simply lengthened, yielding a tiny fraction of an inch of earlier locked body mobility.
A bead of cold sweat rolled from Pei Jing’s forehead, splashing against the floorboards.
His gaze remained fixed on the grey dawn light creeping through the paper lattice window.
The first day had begun.