The cellar beneath the East Wing of the Pei Clan compound was six feet below the frost line. He smelled of cold river damp, cured turnip roots, and aged vinegar.
A single animal fat candle, stuck into the neck of a broken clay pot jug, cast a fluttering ochre glow across the vaulted brick ceiling. The air was still and thick, muffling all sounds from the town above.
Pei Jing sat cross-legged on a split-cedar plank laid over the damp earth.
Before him sat a small bronze fire bowl filled with glowing charcoal embers. Resting on the coals was a battered copper basin containing a mixture of melted bear animal fat, strong yellow rice wine, and crushed dried safflower petals. The liquid was dark amber. It bubbled faintly with a sharp, healing vapor that cleared the nasal passages like crushed menthol.
Pei Jing lifted the basin using an oiled rag, set it on a flat stone. Then he drank half the scalding fluid.
The heat dropped into his throat-pipe like liquid flame. The ethanol rapidly sped up gastric absorption. It drove the packed fatty acids and safflower resins directly into his bloodstream.
Within three minutes, his internal core heat rose to thirty-eight point eight degrees.
His skin flushed dark crimson. Sweat broke across his forearms and chest. He carried with it the faint, pungent scent of rendered mountain fat.
This was the heat window.
Human joint sockets were built from dense, interwoven type-I connective tissue fibers, bound together by proteoglycan ground substance. In cold heat levels, this matrix was rigid, resistant to warping. But under systemic hyperthermia, fueled by high-rich fat fuel and packed blood breath flow, the ground substance temporarily softened. It allowed controlled elongation without tearing the stringy envelope.
Pei Jing reached over to an iron ring anchored deep into the mortar of the cellar wall.
Looping through the ring was a three-foot length of wet hemp rope, half an inch thick, soaked in salted well water to increase friction and eliminate stretch.
He took the rope in both hands. He wrapped it three times around his left wrist, then passing the bitter end through a headsman’s slipknot around his right wrist. He drew the knot tight with his teeth. He pulled until the coarse hemp fibers bit into his outer skin, cutting off superficial dark-blood return.
His wrists were locked against the iron ring, less than four inches apart.
An ordinary man trapped in such bindings could pull until his skin tore to the bone without gaining a fraction of an inch. The wrist bones of the human hand formed a rigid, transverse arch that exceeded the width of any loop smaller than five inches across.
Pei Jing closed his eyes.
He didn’t pull. Pulling engaged the flexor and extensor muscles of the forearm, swelling the muscular compartments and locking the joint stonework even tighter.
He began his practice of Joint Popped joint and Resetting.
He began with the right thumb.
The first carpometacarpal joint was a saddle joint, normally steadied by the anterior oblique joint cord and the intermetacarpal joint cord. Through two hours of prior static elongation drills, those joint cords had already lengthened by a tiny fraction of an inch.
Pei Jing exhaled. He consciously suppressed the automatic stretch reflex in his right abductor pollicis brevis.
Then, using a sharp, internal muscular contraction of the adductor pollicis, he forced the head of the hand bone forward and downward. It slid it out of the trapezium’s shallow saddle.
Pop.
The sound inside his wrist was small, sharp, and wet, like a green reed snapping beneath water.
A jolt of nearby, nauseating pain spiked along the forearm nerve, shooting directly into his neck spine. His breath hitched for half a second. Then his pulse steadied, steadying at fifty beats per minute.
Pain was merely living tracking data. It informed the central nervous system that a load-bearing popped joint had occurred. It wasn’t a command to stop.
With the hand bone out-of-joint and folded flat against the palm, the width of his right hand shrank by nearly an inch. The rigid wrist arch flattened into a slender, parallel bundle of bones.
He rotated his wrist ninety degrees. The lubricated skin, slick with sweat and bear animal fat, slid through the tight hemp coils with easy ease.
His right hand slipped fully free of the knot.
Pei Jing didn’t pause to massage the wrist.
He gripped his right thumb with his left fingers, lined up the base of the hand bone with the trapezium. Then he drove the bone backward with steady, linear traction.
Clack.
The head of the bone seated cleanly back into the articular fossa. The anterior joint cord tightened, snapping the joint back into its joint socket.
He bent his fingers: three rapid, tight fists. Zero numbness. Zero crepitus. Full motor control restored in less than two seconds.
He smiled faintly in the dim candlelight.
A mortal warrior who relied only on strength was a prisoner of his own skeletal cage. Locked by grappling holds. Then, caught in iron chains, or trapped in narrow stone-built crevices, raw muscle was useless. But a fighter whose joints could voluntarily dislocate and reset became an eel within iron tongs.
He reset the rope, binding his left hand, and repeated the procedure.
Popped joint: four seconds.
Passage through the coils: two seconds.
Reduction and reset: one second.
For two full hours, in the silence of the cellar, Pei Jing step by step systematically out-of-joint and reset the joints of his upper hands and feet.
First the carpometacarpal joints of both thumbs.
Then the distal radioulnar joints of both wrists, allowing his radius to cross over the forearm bone to compress the wrist outer rim by twenty percent.
Finally, the most dangerous: the shoulder socket of his right shoulder.
To dislocate a shoulder voluntarily needed complete relaxation of the rotator cuff muscles—the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis—followed by a coordinated downward pull of the broad back muscles.
The head of his right upper arm bone slid forward out of the shallow glenoid fossa. Then, his right arm went limp, hanging three inches lower than normal, fully useless.
Pei Jing placed his right elbow against the brick cellar wall, leaned his body weight forward at a forty-five-degree angle. Then he shrugged his upper back muscle.
Thunk.
The humeral head snapped back into the joint capsule with the heavy, solid thud of an iron bolt slamming home in a lock.
Two hours struck.
In his eye field, the monospace stone-slate screen lit up against the darkness:
Pei Jing let out a long breath, blowing a cloud of water drops through the candlelight.
Ten percent. The first installment on a backup technique that would prevent enemy grappling holds from ever neutralizing his strikes. Combined with his Limit-Break Flesh Forging and Tier 2 Tendon Elasticity, his upper body was ceasing to be an assemblage of fragile mortal bones. It was becoming a linked motion machine.
He drank the leftover bear animal fat and rice wine from the copper basin. He wiped his lips with the back of his forearm.
Above his head, the heavy oak trapdoor leading to the East Wing hall creaked open.
A pair of hurried footsteps dropped the wooden stairs, with the yellow glare of an oil lantern.
Second Son Pei Lang stepped into the cellar.
Pei Lang was twenty years old, with broad shoulders, a short-cropped beard, and the wide, blunt jaw of the Pei lineage. He wore a heavy leather cuirass over coarse wool trousers, a standard iron broadsword strapped to his waist. His knuckles were bruised, and his forehead was streaked with black coal soot.
“Jing’er,” Pei Lang breathed, his chest heaving as he held the lantern high. “I knew you were down here. Father has been looking for you for two hours.”
Pei Jing stood up from the cedar plank, brushing dried salt dust from his trousers. “What happened at the docks?”
Pei Lang clenched his jaw, his right hand gripping his sword handle knob until the leather wraps creaked.
“Hu Biao has closed the river,” Pei Lang said, his voice shaking with suppressed fury. “Fully closed. Four coal barges from South Hill were boarded at the mouth of the canal by fifty Black Tiger cutthroats. They didn’t just demand the surcharge. They beat our barge pilots with iron gaffs and threw two of our guards into the river.”
“Are the men alive?” Pei Jing asked, his voice low and level.
“Captain Cao fished them out with boat hooks half a mile downstream,” Pei Lang said. He spat on the cellar floor. “One has a fractured arm. The other swallowed two pints of river mud and took an iron claw across the ribs. If Cao hadn’t reached them with the skiff, they would be dead.”
Pei Lang stepped closer, his bloodshot eyes locking onto Pei Jing.
“And that’s not all. Patriarch Zhao’s carriage arrived at our main gate twenty minutes ago. Zhao Cangshan didn’t even get out of the carriage. His steward handed father a written contract: the Zhao Clan offers to purchase all four coal barges and the six iron ore shipments currently stuck at the docks—for twenty-five percent of market price. If father doesn’t sign by noon tomorrow, Hu Biao will scuttle the barges in the canal channel.”
“If the canal is blocked by scuttled barges,” Pei Jing said calmly, “no shipment can leave Cloudford Town for sixty days until the yamen dredges the mud. By then, the winter ice will have locked the river.”
“Exactly!” Pei Lang slammed his fist against a brick pillar. “It’s extortion! The elders are scared. Second Uncle wants to sign the contract and surrender the iron to save the barges. Father is sitting by the fire bowl smoking his pipe, saying nothing.”
Pei Lang grabbed Pei Jing’s shoulder.
“You killed eight of their men at the warehouse, Jing’er. Don’t deny it. I saw the blood tracks outside your door. You have martial skill now. Come to the hall with me. Tell the elders we can fight them at the docks!”
Pei Jing looked at his brother’s bruised knuckles, then down at the floorboards.
“Fighting eighty men on open wharves with twenty clan guards is a deficit transaction, Second Brother,” Pei Jing said evenly. “We have twenty men. They have two hundred. On an open dock, numbers dictate encirclement. We would lose twelve guards, half the barges would burn. The elders would surrender before sunset.”
Pei Lang froze, staring at him in confusion. “Then what? We just sit here and let Zhao Cangshan steal our iron?”
“No,” Pei Jing said.
He walked to the corner of the cellar, picking up his bamboo scroll tube and his dark wool travel cloak. Beside the cloak lay the Black Mountain Whetstone in its oiled pigskin pouch. He tucked the dark rock stone into his breast pocket. He felt the dished stone face press firm against his chest bone.
“A river is blockaded by boats, not words,” Pei Jing said. His voice flat as were cold slate. “Before you can cut the net, you must have a blade that doesn’t shatter when it hits iron.”
He looked at Pei Lang.
“Tell father to delay the contract until tomorrow evening. Tell him to offer fifty copper coins of compromise to keep Zhao’s steward talking. Don’t let any guards leave the compound.”
“Where are you going?” Pei Lang asked, staring at the bamboo tube in Pei Jing’s hand.
“To the northern ravine,” Pei Jing said, tying his cloak at the throat. “To fetch an axe.”