The frost came before midnight, riming the courtyard cedar beams in white needle crystals.
Pei Jing stood beneath the roof edges of the East Wing. He watched the cold mist coil over the tiled roofs. The air tasted of bitter coal dust and river rot, carried on an easterly breeze from the Cloudford docks.
In the center of the courtyard, two heavy upright cedar pillars supported a crossbeam ten feet above the flat stone slabs. It was an old military training rig, erected three decades ago when Pei Hongcheng still drilled recruits for the border guard posts. Iron eye-bolts were driven deep into the seasoned wood, rusted dark brown by years of autumn rain.
Pei Jing threw off his rough hemp coat, leaving his chest bare to the freezing air.
Across his upper back, the pale silver line of the Limit-Break seam remained quiet. It didn’t pull or ache under the cold. The locked myofibril cables held the tissue tight, impervious to the northern wind.
He reached into his rucksack. He pulled out two broad leather wrist cuffs and two ankle wraps lined with boiled pigskin. Iron rings were riveted into the leather. Beside them lay a pair of forty-jin stone balance weights, chiseled from dense river limestone and fitted with forged hooks.
He attached the stone weights to a hemp harness buckled around his hips. Eighty jin of dead weight pulled downward. He dragged against his lower-back bones and the heads of his femurs.
Then he reached upward, took a short two-step approach across the frosted flat stone slabs, and sprang.
His feet left the ground without a heard stomp. The explosive power of his thighs and calves launched his frame straight into the air, hands latching onto the overhead cedar crossbeam with a dull, dry slap. He slid the forged iron carabiners of his wrist cuffs through the overhead eye-bolts. He locked the pins.
He hung suspended four feet above the flat stone slabs.
Eighty jin of limestone dragged at his pelvis. His shoulders bore the first pulling shock, the acromioclavicular joints groaning under the sudden downward shear.
Pei Jing didn’t allow his muscles to contract. He forced his chest muscles, lats, and biceps to relax fully, surrendering the load to his muscle-sheath web.
The Python Tendon-Stretching Stance was not a drill of muscle endurance. Flesh was compliant. Muscle fibers stretched and tightened with body-energy ease. Tendons, aponeuroses, and joint sockets were stubborn, dense connective tissue cables that refused elongation until subjected to prolonged, painful static tension.
Within three minutes, the pain arrived.
It began in the palmar muscle sheet of his hands. It spread like cold fire along the grip tendons of his wrists. It passed the elbows, and anchored into the coracoid processes of his shoulders. Below his waist, the heavy stones dragged his hips downward, stretching the iliofemoral joint cords until the connective tissue felt like dry hemp cord pulled across a dull blade.
His breathing slowed to a deep, deep-belly rhythm.
Inhale four counts. Compress the belly wall. Exhale eight counts. Lengthen the spine.
With each breath out, he allowed gravity to pull his hip joints a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch further from the acetabulum. His joints were not breaking. They were opening. The thick stringy capsules that bound mortal bones were yielding space.
At thirty minutes, the frost on his bare shoulders melted, washed away by a thin sheen of scalding sweat.
At sixty minutes, his vision narrowed. The courtyard became a wash of grey mist and black timber. Every sense nerve in his body screamed that his arms were being cut from his torso. An ordinary youth would have dropped to the flat stone slabs within ten minutes to avoid permanent joint popped joint.
Pei Jing kept his pulse fixed at forty-eight beats per minute.
He knew the living math. Connective tissue cross-links didn’t remodel through wishful thinking or mystical discovery. They remodeled through controlled clockwork warping. If he quit at fifty-nine minutes, the day’s practice was void. Zero yield. An irrecoverable deficit of time.
At eighty-five minutes, a series of muffled, sharp pops rang along his spinal column.
Clack. Thwack. Clack.
From the sacrum upward to the neck bones, the interspinous joint cords lengthened. His spine settled into a straight, pressure drop posture, releasing pressure that had tightly packed the dorsal nerve roots since his youth.
At one hour and fifty-nine minutes, the strain along his knee tendons reached an electric, white-hot pitch.
Two hours struck.
Pei Jing reached up with his left fingers, popped the locking pin of the carabiner. Then he swung his body downward.
He dropped four feet through the cold air.
When his bare feet struck the frosted flat stone slabs, there was no jarring bone shock. His Achilles tendons and plantar muscle tissue absorbed the eighty-jin downward driving force like massive, hardened steel leaf springs, compressing smoothly and rebounding with zero ankle instability.
He unbuckled the hip harness, letting the stone weights rest against the flat stone slabs.
In his eye vision, the cold stone-slate HUD showed up with razor-sharp borders:
The text remained etched against the dim grey dawn for three seconds, then dissolved.
Pei Jing rolled his shoulders backward.
A dry, rhythmic crackling sounded inside both shoulder capsules, like river stones tumbling in a strong current. His arms hung three-quarters of an inch lower than they had yesterday, yet when he tightened his grip, the finger pads dug into his palms with terrifying, whip-like tension.
He tested his footing. He sank into a low crouch, coiled his hips, and snapped upward without a running start.
His body launched into the air like a crossbow bolt. His fingertips brushed the bottom of the crossbeam ten feet overhead before gravity arrested his ascent. He landed silently on the balls of his feet, knees bending slightly to bleed away the downward driving force.
Tendon stretch was an entirely different clockwork engine from raw muscular contraction. Muscle took a split second to recruit. Tendon snap was instant, discharging stored clockwork energy with zero body-energy delay.
Then his stomach wildly convulsed.
The body-energy bill had arrived. Rebuilding muscle-sheath connective tissue and synthesizing dense glycosaminoglycans inside four major joint sockets demanded high-thickness raw material. If he fed his body only boiled rice and turnips, his liver would cannibalize existing joint fluid to patch the micro-tears. That left his knees dry and arthritic by winter.
He pulled on his grey robe, cinched his belt, and walked into the side storage pantry.
Aunt Fang was already there, carrying a clay pot stew pot wrapped in a thick wool blanket. She set it on the rough bench, her eyes dark with tiredness.
“Your father sent this down from the main cellar, Third Master,” she said quietly, untying the cloth. “Two jars of pickled steer tendon, simmered since midnight with yellow wine and dried angelica root. Three pounds total.”
Pei Jing lifted the lid. The broth was dark brown, thick and glistening with melted gelatin, emitting a pungent aroma of scorched roots and marrow fat.
“How much did the butcher charge?” Pei Jing asked.
“Four hundred and fifty copper coins,” Aunt Fang replied, wiping her apron. “The butcher said steer tendons are hard to come by this week. The Black Tiger Gang impounded three cattle carts at the north ferry. They’re taking a half-portion of all beef coming across the river.”
Pei Jing picked up a pair of bamboo chopsticks. “The butcher was paid in full?”
“Paid from your clan pay, young master,” she said softly. “The master told me to make sure you had fresh tendon broth every morning, no matter what Hu Biao does at the ferry.”
Pei Jing nodded. “Thank you, Aunt Fang.”
She paused by the door, wringing her hands. “Third Master... The dock couriers came by the kitchen gate an hour ago. They say Scar-Faced Liu is hobbling through the waterfront with forty men. They’re checking every young man with bloodstains on his sleeves. They know the warehouse killer carried an old mountain chopper.”
“They know nothing,” Pei Jing said evenly. “Eat your morning porridge and keep the compound gates bolted.”
Aunt Fang bowed her head and slipped away, her cloth slippers whispering against the stone passage.
Pei Jing sat down and began to eat.
The steer tendon was tough and jelly-like, cooked down until it yielded to steady chewing. He chewed each piece thoroughly, mixing it with spit before letting the connective tissue-rich mass slide into his burning stomach.
As the dense protein and yellow wine hit his gut, his gastric arteries dilated. A hot, heavy pulse moved through his lower back. It traveled straight down the thigh sheaths into his aching knee capsules. The deep, dry itch in his joints softened, replaced by a soothing, high-pressure warmth.
The cost was heavy: nearly half a silver coin daily simply for steer tendons and healing broth. At this burn rate, his twelve-silver monthly pay would be exhausted in twenty-five days. That left nothing for wild ginseng or winter clothes.
He needed more cash flow. And he needed it before Hu Biao tightened the cordon around Cloudford Town.
He finished the broth, stacked the empty pot, and returned to his sleeping quarters.
On the low table lay his notched pig-iron mountain chopper, alongside the Black Mountain Whetstone.
Pei Jing picked up the heavy blade. The balance was clumsy. Six pounds of brittle, low-carbon iron forged into a broad, box-shaped cleaver. It was a tool designed for splitting firewood and butchering sheep, not channeling the explosive torque of tendon-stretched strikes.
He placed the whetstone in a shallow wooden tray filled with cold water, brought the blade down. Then he began the daily sharpening ritual.
Shhh-clink. Shhh-clink.
He worked with clockwork focus, alternating five strokes on the left edge, five strokes on the right, grinding down the irregular notches left by warehouse bone.
He reached the midsection of the blade. Then, where a cutthroat’s iron knuckles had struck the steel during the night ambush, a sharp ping sounded in the quiet room.
Pei Jing lifted the blade to the grey window light.
A three-sided fragment of iron, half an inch wide, had fractured along a hidden cooling seam and fallen onto the whetstone. A jagged crack branched two inches upward toward the spine.
The steel had fatigued.
His newly conditioned tendons had discharged their elastic snap during the warehouse battle. Then, the blasting blast wave had exceeded the shear modulus of cheap pig iron. The blade was internally fractured. If he struck a man wearing a boiled leather cuirass or blocked an iron weapon again, the chopper would shatter into lethal shrapnel in his face.
Pei Jing touched the cracked steel with his thumb.
A warrior without a balanced tool was a debt on his own balance sheet.
He laid the broken blade down, walked to his small writing desk, and pulled out a sheet of yellow oiled paper and a block of pine-soot ink.
He ground the ink with cold water, picked up a wolf-hair brush. Then he began to draft with straight, sharp-angled lines.
He didn’t draw a narrow, elegant dueling sword favored by clan heirs in the country capital. Those thin, flexible blades snapped under bone impacts and were useless against timber shields.
He drew a heavy, single-edged cleaver-saber.
Length: three feet, two inches.
Spine: nearly half an inch thick at the handle, tapering to a heavy chisel-ground tip designed for cracking armor and severing spine bones.
Blade width: three inches across the sweet spot, flared slightly at the point of impact to shift the center of percussion forward.
A single deep blood groove running along the upper third of the spine to prevent high-pressure suction in dense muscle tissue.
Weighted to twenty-two jin of hardened hard dark metal steel.
Pei Jing blew on the fresh ink, watching the black strokes dry into the oiled paper.
There was only one man within fifty miles of Cloudford Town who could forge high-hard dark metal billet without introducing fatal melted rock waste inclusions. Master Mo Tie, whose mountain forge stood at the throat of the northern ravine.
Pei Jing rolled the paper, slipped it into an oiled bamboo tube. Then he tucked it into his sharkskin belt.
Beside the broken chopper, his twelve flying steel needles gleamed in their forearm wrist guard, quiet and sharp.
He buckled the wrist guard beneath his grey sleeve, strapped on his straw travel sandals. Then he walked out into the cold morning mist.