The dusk fell over the East Wing courtyard like cold soot.
A biting northern draft swept down from the limestone crags of Cloudford Mountain, rattling the dried persimmon branches hanging from the roof edges. In the center of the courtyard, the hard-packed earth was swept clean of gravel. That left only the dark, compacted clay and the faint ring of an embedded chopping post.
Pei Jing sat on a low wooden bench beside a cedar water tub.
Across his knees lay the weapon that had accompanied him since his first day in this world: the chipped pig-iron mountain chopper.
It was two point two feet long, weighing barely six pounds. The blade was dark, stained with dried river mud, oil. The rusted iron residue of eight cutthroats from the grain warehouse. Near the belly of the blade, two jagged crescents were missing from the edge where it had struck an iron-rimmed truncheon.
Beside his foot sat the Black Mountain Whetstone.
The whetstone was eight inches long, three inches thick, carved from fine-grained black fiery dark rock quarried from the western river gorges. Its surface was worn smooth in the center, hollowed into a shallow saddle by thousands of deliberate strokes.
Pei Jing scooped cold well water with a split-bamboo ladle, pouring it across the dark stone.
Splash.
The water pooled in the hollow, glistening under the fading sky. He applied three drops of winterized rapeseed oil to the surface, working it with his thumb until a slick, grey emulsion formed.
Then he took the chopper in his right hand.
He set the edge against the dark rock at an exact angle of twenty-two degrees.
Shhh-clink.
The stroke was slow, measured, and perfectly flat. Pei Jing drew the blade from the heel to the curved tip, his forearm muscles leftover loose and supple. The sound feedback of the metal grinding across stone produced a dry, rasping shaking that traveled up the radius and forearm bone, registering in his elbow joint.
Shhh-clink. Shhh-clink.
Grey metal slurry gathered along the flank of the blade.
Pei Jing stopped after forty strokes. He wiped the slurry away with a scrap of clean linen. Then he ran the pad of his thumb lightly across the newly ground edge.
He shook his head.
The micro-grain of the pig iron was too coarse. Cloudford’s local surface kilns operated at sub-optimal smelting heat levels. That left the cast iron riddled with tiny sulfur inclusions and melted rock waste pockets. When subjected to light work—chopping firewood or skinning mountain hares—the edge held passably. But under violent impact, the ferrite crystal matrix twisted. The newly sharpened edge was already rolling under the pressure of his calloused thumb.
A weapon with a soft edge was a debt on a ledger.
In combat, a compromised tool forced the fighter to compensate with excess muscular tension, throwing off perfect bone posture and wasting body-energy.
He stood up from the bench.
In the center of the courtyard stood a seasoned log of dried mountain ash, six feet tall and eight inches thick, buried two feet into the clay. Mountain ash was renowned among wheelwrights and cooperages for its dense, interwoven grain and resilience against splitting.
Pei Jing stepped three paces back from the post.
He loosened his shoulders, letting his arms hang naturally at his sides.
For ten days, the Python Tendon-Stretching Stance had remodeled his musculoskeletal frame. The deep connective tissue cross-links in his thoracolumbar muscle tissue, broad back muscles, and chest muscle anchors had tightened, shedding water weight and replacing loose stringy tissue with dense, coiled cords of elastic protein.
His muscles were no longer separate contractile engines. They were interconnected pulleys linked by iron-hard living cables.
He brought the chopper up to his right shoulder.
First Form of the Gale Saber: Cleaving the Riverbank.
He didn’t use the conventional arm-swing taught in town guard barracks.
He rooted his left heel into the packed clay. His left hip rotated inward fifteen degrees, coiling the iliotibial band and the gluteal muscle tissue like a wound twisting force spring. The moving chain started from the earth. Ground-reaction force surged through his calf, locked through his hip bones, whipped through the spinal rotators, and sped up through his right shoulder socket.
The iron chopper dropped in a slanted downward arc.
The speed of the blade was blinding. The flat of the blade tightly packed the cold autumn air with a sharp, whistling hiss that sounded like tearing silk.
Crack-clang!
The impact in the courtyard sounded not of splitting wood. It was an iron anvil struck by a flying sledgehammer.
A shower of white wood splinters erupted from the ash log.
Then came a violent, high-pitched ringing sound—sharp, brittle, and bone-shaking.
Pei Jing felt an abrupt, deadening shudder transmit down the wooden handle into his hand bones.
He stepped back, lowering his hand.
The ash post had not been cut. The cut had pierced four inches into the dense heartwood before stopping cold.
And embedded in the wood were two jagged pieces of broken grey metal.
Pei Jing looked down at his right hand.
He was holding only the handle and five inches of the chopper’s thick blade collar. The leftover eighteen inches of the pig-iron blade had shattered into three distinct fragments upon impact. One shard was lodged deep in the ash log. Another lay six paces away in the gravel, twisted like an autumn leaf. The third had spun past his left cheek, nicking the hem of his robe before embedding itself in the courtyard fence.
The pig iron had reached its clockwork limit.
The blade’s pulling strength was less than thirty thousand pounds of pressure. Pei Jing’s tendon-stretched power chain released full torque. Then, the spinning force exceeded the yield point of the brittle ferrite matrix. The steel had simply torn itself apart along its internal sulfur faults.
Pei Jing examined the fractured stub in his palm.
The grain at the break point was large, granular, and dull grey, resembling dried sea salt rather than refined steel.
“The tool can’t bear the capital,” Pei Jing said quietly into the dusk.
If he had struck Iron Claw Hu Biao’s hard dark metal claws with this chopper on the river docks, the blade would have exploded on the first block. That left him unarmed against three hardened steel talons.
In mortal combat, equipment failure was not an accident. It was a total failure of risk management.
He walked to the fence, retrieved the jagged iron shard, pulled the embedded piece from the ash post. Then he gathered the leftover fragment from the gravel. He carried all three pieces back to the wooden bench, laying them beside the handle.
Then he went into his room.
He pulled back the straw mattress on his bed, lifted a loose floorboard beneath the bedpost. Then he retrieved his iron lockbox.
He opened the brass padlock with a slender iron key. He counted his assets:
Eighteen silver coins in marked country bars.
Four thousand two hundred copper coins strung on waxed hemp cords.
Twelve silver coins from his recent pay increase, handed to him by his father after the warehouse defense.
Total liquid reserves: thirty silver coins and four thousand two hundred copper coins.
Pei Jing took twenty-five silver coins from the box. He wrapped the heavy metal bars in an oiled leather pouch and tied it securely inside his inner robe. Five silver coins and the copper strings remained in the box for household emergency reserves.
Next, he walked over to his wooden writing desk.
He laid out a sheet of thick, durable Korean mulberry paper, weighted at the corners with smooth river pebbles. He lit an oil lamp, ground a stick of pine-soot ink with clear well water on his slate inkstone, and dipped a fine horsehair drafting brush.
He didn’t draw an artistic rendering of a sword.
He drew a clockwork building draft. He was marked with exact space-folding ratios, balance tolerances, and functional cross-sections.
A gentleman’s straight sword was designed for thrusting through silk robes in duelists’ courtyards. A standard army broadsword was mass-produced for slashing unarmored conscripts.
Neither was suited for the brutality of town underworld war.
Hu Biao’s cutthroats wore boiled buffalo hide, copper-riveted jerkins, and carried iron-banded truncheons. To stop such defenses needed a weapon with huge driving force, massive twisting stiffness. A cutting shape that couldn’t be pinched or wedged in dense muscle and bone.
Pei Jing’s brush moved with steady, sharp-angled care:
Overall length: three point two feet.
Blade length: two point four feet.
Handle length: zero point eight feet—long enough for a full two-handed grip with heavy rawhide wraps. But balanced for single-handed snapping whips.
Spine thickness: twelve tiny fractions of an inch at the blade collar, maintaining ten tiny fractions of an inch through the middle third, tapering to seven tiny fractions of an inch at the chisel tip. A spine that thick could block iron maces and deflect crossbow bolts without flexing.
Blade width: two point five inches along the waist, flaring outward aggressively to four inches at the end-post chopping head.
Weight: exactly twenty-two point zero pounds.
Along both flanks of the blade, Pei Jing inked twin parallel fullers. It was deep blood grooves running from the ricasso to within four inches of the tip. The grooves served two vital physical functions. They removed leech-like dead weight while preserving load-bearing I-beam stiffness. They broke water-pressure empty pocket when cutting through dense living tissue. That kept the blade from sticking in cut joint padding.
At the top of the paper, he ground fresh ink and wrote four bold characters:
Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
And beneath the name, he specified the metalworking requirement:
Material: South Hill High-Manganese Pig Iron, folded three hundred times, cold-well salt water cooled, clay-differential hardened.
He set the brush down, blew gently across the ink until it dried matte-black. Then he rolled the heavy mulberry paper into a sealed bamboo tube.
From the storeroom corner, he hoisted a heavy wicker basket containing six twenty-pound billets of raw pig iron from the South Hill kilns. This was the finest batch smelted before the lockout. Rich in naturally occurring hard dark metal, which imparted high impact toughness and work-hardening properties when forged properly.
One hundred and twenty pounds of raw metal.
He slung the basket over his shoulders, letting the wide hemp straps settle across his chest. With his tendon-heavy stance, the weight felt no heavier than a traveler’s light pack.
He stepped out of the East Wing into the cold evening mist. Then, a pale amber glow flickered across his vision:
Pei Jing walked past the silent clan courtyard, slipped through the rear gate. Then he took the rocky path leading up into Cloudford Mountain.
Above him, five miles into the dark granite gorge, the distant, rhythmic pounding of a high-pressure trip-hammer echoed through the night like the heartbeat of an iron beast.
Master Mo Tie was still at his anvil.