The steady progression of compound interest possessed no drama. It needed only the cold, unvarying payment of time.
For eight days following his visit to the Vast Treasure Pavilion, Pei Jing didn’t leave the outer edge of the Pei Clan compound. He didn’t attend the morning meetings in the old family hall where the elders argued over the price of winter millet, nor did he join his brother Pei Lang at the smelting kilns.
Every morning at the fourth watch, when the town was buried beneath wet fog, he stood in the East Wing courtyard.
He burned up two heaping spoonfuls of melted bear animal fat, washed down with a scalding decoction made from slices of the eleven-year wild ginseng root. Then he buckled the eighty-jin stone balance weights to his hip harness, gripped the overhead cedar crossbeam. Then he surrendered his skeletal frame to gravity.
The daily two-hour load was non-negotiable.
On Day 4, the deep aching shifted from his shoulder capsules into the chest spine.
On Day 6, the between-rib joint cords connecting his ribs to his chest bone began to lengthen. Breathing became deeper, almost easy. His lung volume swelled by nearly a third as the restrictive connective tissue surrounding his ribs yielded under tension.
On Day 8, the palmar muscle tissue in both hands thickened. His fingers, already scarred from years of handling iron ore, took on an unnatural pulling thickness. When he curled his fingers into a fist, the tendons didn’t slide smoothly like oiled cords. They tightened with the sudden, metal snap of a steel spring releasing its tension.
Now, on the morning of Day 10, the first true freeze of early winter had settled over Cloudford Town.
The mud in the courtyard had frozen solid into jagged, grey ridges. Icicles hung from the cedar roof edges like semi-clear daggers, dripping slowly into the frozen well bucket.
Pei Jing hung from the crossbeam, his body coated in a thin layer of crystal-clear frost where his sweat had met the sub-zero air.
His eyes were closed. His pulse beat at forty-four cycles per minute, slow as a hibernating beast.
Within his vertebral column, an intense sound tension had built up over the past twenty minutes. The seventy-two intervertebral joint cords, conditioned by twenty hours of sustained pulling traction, were resisting the downward drag of the eighty-jin stone weights.
Then, at one hour and fifty-seven minutes, the pushback collapsed.
Crack.
The sound began at the base of his neck, where the neck bones met the first chest bone.
Crack. Thwack. Crack.
It traveled downward along his spine like a string of firecrackers exploding under wet leather. The sound was dry, brittle, and loud in the frozen courtyard. It echoed like the shells of wild hazelnuts being crushed one by one beneath the heel of an iron boot.
Every vertebra shifted a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch, unlocking decades of postural squeezing. A surge of scalding living fluid rushed into the decompressed disc spaces, with a sudden, intense lightness across his entire nervous system.
Two hours struck.
Pei Jing popped the iron carabiner with his left index finger.
He fell through the cold air, dropping straight toward the frozen mud.
Instead of bending his knees deeply to absorb the four-foot drop, his legs remained nearly straight. His Achilles tendons, thickened with dense type-I connective tissue cross-linking, met the ground with the resilience of hardened carriage springs. They tightly packed an inch, stored the elastic energy, and rebounded instantly. That brought him to a motionless, balanced halt without displacing a single speck of frost.
In his eye vision, the dark stone-slate screen flared to life, its borders gleaming with cold, chiseled care:
The text remained etched against the dim grey dawn for three seconds, then dissolved.
Pei Jing exhaled a long plume of grey vapor.
He rolled his shoulders. His height had increased by nearly an inch over the past ten days, not from bone growth, but from the full pressure drop of his spinal column and the lengthening of his postural joint cords. His arms hung longer, looser, hovering naturally within two inches of his waist.
He unbuckled the hip harness, setting the stone weights down against the outer edge wall.
Then his ears twitched.
His sense awareness, heightened by the uncompressed skull nerves at the base of his skull, caught a strange flaw thirty paces to the north.
It wasn’t the sound of wind. It was the faint, rhythmic scraping of greased cowhide against damp brick—a boot toe seeking purchase on the outer mortar seams of the ten-foot compound wall.
Pei Jing didn’t turn his head. He remained standing by the stone weights, his back facing the northern wall, his stance relaxed and loose.
Through the faint glow on the frosted surface of the well bucket, he watched.
A pair of hands wrapped in greasy leather straps appeared over the top row of grey bricks. Then a head rose slowly into the cold mist: greasy black hair, yellowed riverman eyes, and rotting teeth.
It was the Black Tiger Gang river scout from the alley outside the Vast Treasure Pavilion.
The scout had spent seven days searching the compound outer edge. He waited for an opportunity when the courtyard guards were changing shifts. In his right hand, tucked against his chest, rested the carved bone whistle shaped like a carp skull. If he blew that whistle, thirty gang cutthroats waiting in the alleyways two blocks away would know the third son was isolated in the East Wing.
The scout shifted his weight to pull his torso over the low roof wall.
Pei Jing’s left hand rested loosely against his thigh. Three inches from his fingertips lay a pile of dark river pebbles, frozen into the mud beside the well.
He didn’t turn around. He didn’t shift his feet. He didn’t telegraph the strike with a shoulder rotation or a breath intake.
His right heel pressed downward into the frozen earth.
From the plantar muscle tissue of his foot, an explosive wave of striking force surged upward through his calf, snapping through the coiled spring of his Achilles tendon, bypassing the thigh muscles entirely, and discharging directly into his hip. His spine whipped thirty degrees.
His right hand dropped, scooped a smooth limestone pebble the size of a walnut from the mud, and snapped backward in a blind, low-angle release.
Crack.
The sound was not the whistling hum of a thrown rock. It was the sharp, violent sonic snap of a dry leather whip cracking at transonic speed.
The limestone pebble crossed twenty-five paces of freezing air in less than a tenth of a second, invisible against the grey mist.
It struck the river scout directly on his right collar bone.
The impact was total. The dense limestone shattered upon contact, driving sharp bone shards through the scout’s leather vest and splintering the collarbone into four distinct fragments. The force tore the bone whistle from his frozen fingers, sending it spinning into the weeds below.
The scout didn’t scream. The bone-shaking shock blew the air from his lungs. That forced a wet, strangled cough from his throat as his grip on the brick low roof wall failed.
He plummeted backward into the alleyway on the other side of the wall.
Pei Jing listened.
A heavy, wet thud sounded in the alley. It was followed by the muffled groan of a man whose breath had been crushed out of his chest. Then came the wild, dragging scrape of boots as the scout pulled himself through the frozen mud, crawling toward the safety of the main street like a maimed dog.
Pei Jing walked to the wall, placed his fingertips on the brickwork, and vaulted lightly to the top with a single easy spring of his ankles.
He looked down into the alley.
A dark trail of bright red blood and scattered grey bone meal marked the frozen ruts where the scout had dragged his shattered shoulder through the slush.
Pei Jing pulled out his small pocket balance sheet—a thin slip of oiled paper tucked inside his sharkskin belt—and made a mental math.
The scout was severely injured, with a compound collar bone fracture and a punctured right upper back muscle. In Cloudford Town’s winter cold, a man crawling through mud with that injury moved at about two miles per hour. It would take him forty-five minutes to reach the Black Tiger Gang stronghold at the river wharves.
It would take another twenty minutes for Scar-Faced Liu to inspect the wound, interrogate the scout, and confirm that the third son was not a helpless clerk. But a martial fighter possessing dangerous striking speed.
Hu Biao would have the report before noon.
The window for passive buildup was closing. The gang wouldn’t send solitary scouts again. Their next move would be a full outer edge sweep with torches and iron gaffs.
Pei Jing jumped down from the wall, landing noiselessly in the courtyard.
He walked to the low table beneath the East Wing porch.
His chipped pig-iron chopper lay there, its fractured spine split wide from the morning frost. The tool was dead. It couldn’t take another strike. Beside the broken blade sat the Black Mountain Whetstone. He poured a splash of cold tea over the dark rock. Then he ran his thumbnail down the stone’s dished belly, acknowledging that the dead iron had balanced its final account before turning his attention to the new design.
He picked up the bamboo tube from his writing desk, tapping the oiled blueprints against his palm.
He needed the Cloud-Splitter. And he needed it forged before the Black Tiger Gang mobilized their main force at the docks.
Pei Jing pulled on his travel coat, tied his sharkskin belt tightly over his waist. Then he walked toward the western gate.
The hammer of Master Mo Tie was waiting.