The brook that flowed past Cloudford Mountain Forge was fed by high limestone springs, clear as melting glass and cold enough to numb a man’s fingers in thirty seconds.
Along the bank of the brook. There, the grey granite boulders met the gravel shoals, Pei Jing sat cross-legged on a flat cedar timber.
The night sky above the ravine was clear and black, strewn with cold, sharp stars. The wind smelled of damp pine needles and the distant, acrid smoke of the forge kilns.
Across Pei Jing’s knees lay the naked blade of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
Beside his right knee sat the Black Mountain Whetstone.
The black fiery dark rock block was sunk in a shallow cedar basin filled with brook water. Pei Jing lifted the stone, setting it firmly into a notched wooden jig clamped to the timber plank.
He dipped his left fingers into the water, sprinkling a handful across the dark, porous stone.
Splash.
Then he uncorked a small horn flask, applying four drops of winterized rapeseed oil to the surface. He worked the oil into the wet dark rock with the heel of his palm until a slick, grey emulsion formed across the grit.
He brought the heavy blade down to the stone.
Shhh-clink.
The contact between hardened hard dark metal steel and dark rock produced a low, ringing scrape that echoed softly over the rushing brook.
Grinding a twenty-two-pound cleaver was not an act of casual upkeep. It was a prolonged, body-leverage negotiation between human tendon and crystal-clear steel.
A blade forged with a hard steel core and a hard dark metal jacket couldn’t be ground on a high-speed sandstone grindstone driven by a waterwheel. High-speed grinding generated nearby frictional heat exceeding three hundred degrees within seconds. It drew the temper from the micro-thin edge and turned brittle, razor-sharp martensite into soft, useless troostite.
To preserve an edge hardness that skates a file across the cutting edge, the metal had to be cut cold, by hand, under a nonstop film of iced brook water.
Pei Jing set the angle of the blade at an exact twenty-two degrees along the central waist.
Shhh-clink. Shhh-clink.
He worked with alternating strokes: twenty strokes pushing forward from the ricasso to the waist, twenty strokes drawing back. He was followed by an immediate flip to the opposing edge.
His hands didn’t grip the tang with rigid, white-knuckled desperation.
If his forearm muscles clamped tight, muscle burn would pool in the brachioradialis within forty minutes, causing tiny tremors in his wrist. A tremor of half a tiny fraction of an inch would alter the edge angle, rounding the apex of the edge and turning a keen chisel into an axe that bounced off bone.
Pei Jing engaged the Python Tendon Stance in a seated cross-legged stance.
His ischial tuberosities rooted firmly into the split-cedar wood. His pelvic bowl tilted forward five degrees. He locked his lower-back spine into an unbroken, upright column. The movement of the blade was driven entirely by the rhythmic contraction of his broad back muscles, his rhomboids, and the elastic rebound of his thoracolumbar muscle tissue.
His arms were merely the connecting rods of an internal steam engine.
One hour passed.
The brook rushed cold and indifferent over the pebbles.
Grey slurry—a fine mid-air of tiny fiery dark rock grit, iron hardened carbon-iron specks, and rapeseed oil—gathered along the flank of the blade, dripping steadily into the water below.
Pei Jing paused every one hundred strokes to wipe the edge clean with a piece of salted linen.
He ran the pad of his right thumb lightly across the developing backup edge.
The tactile feedback was mapped directly into his body-sense cortex.
At twenty-two degrees, the main edge created an acute cutting wedge designed to slice through muscle and cut sinew. But at the end-post four-inch flared chopping head, Pei Jing deliberately widened the grinding angle to twenty-eight degrees.
Twenty-eight degrees was the angle of a wood-cleaving frow.
It created a robust, obtuse chisel edge that sacrificed minimal cutting smooth speed while increasing load-bearing pushback to chipping by three hundred percent. The flared head dropped onto an iron-banded truncheon or the collarbone of an armored cutthroat. Then, the thicker edge would push the split material apart without rolling or pinching.
Two hours struck.
The flat voice ledger clicked into his visual cortex, its stone-grey lines crisp against the darkness of the mountain:
Pei Jing didn’t stop.
Day broke over the limestone peaks of Cloudford Mountain, turning the grey mist to pale gold.
Mo Tie walked out of the hearth shed carrying a steaming clay pot of millet porridge mixed with boiled pig offal and wild chives. The old smith sat on a nearby boulder, chewing on a dried pork bone. He watched Pei Jing work.
The rhythmic shhh-clink, shhh-clink of the whetstone had not wavered by a single beat since midnight.
“Most young men,” Mo Tie muttered between bites, “think that martial skill is born in the moment you strike your enemy. They practice fast draws. They practice loud shouts. They practice twenty-four forms of flowery sword dances to show off in the marketplace.”
Mo Tie tossed the stripped bone into the brook.
“They don’t understand that ninety percent of war is the dull, painful preparation of the tool. If the steel isn’t true, your courage is just manure for the dogs.”
“War is an audit,” Pei Jing replied without pausing his stroke. “The battlefield is simply the final balance sheet. The accounts are won or lost weeks before the first blow is struck, in the quality of the iron, the thickness of the tendon. The calories in the stomach.”
Mo Tie laughed, a gravelly sound in the morning chill. “You sound more like a funeral director than an accountant.”
“In this world,” Pei Jing said, “the two professions share the same ledgers.”
By the third afternoon of nonstop grinding, the coarse fiery dark rock had done its work.
The main and backup bevels were established across the entire three point two feet of the blade.
Pei Jing shifted the Black Mountain Whetstone, using its reverse face. An ultra-fine, glass-smooth dark rock surface sharpened through decades of campaign use to a micro-grit thickness that rivaled royal jade polishers.
He switched from rapeseed oil to pure brook water mixed with three drops of distilled bitter pine-resin spirits.
Hiss-skrrr. Hiss-skrrr.
The sound profile changed from a coarse rasp to a high-pitched, silky hiss, like autumn wind blowing through dry bamboo leaves.
The dense black dark rock polished away the tiny grinding scratches, leaving the bevels smooth as black glass.
Finally, Pei Jing retrieved a wide strap of vegetable-tanned steer hide, two inches wide and three feet long, pegged tightly to an ash board. He smeared the leather with a thin green paste made of crushed mountain chromium ore and animal fat.
Whup. Whup. Whup.
He stropped the blade.
Twenty passes on each side, drawing the edge trailing away from the leather. The micro-burrs of bent martensite—invisible to the human eye. It measured less than two hair-fractions across—were snapped cleanly away by the gritty leather strap.
When the final pass was completed, the sun was sinking behind the western crags. It cast long, purple shadows across the ravine.
Pei Jing lifted the Cloud-Splitter toward the dying light.
The blade didn’t gleam with the blinding, shiny mirror polish favored by court aristocrats. A shiny blade was a death sentence in night combat, flashing like a bright light in the moonlight.
Instead, the three hundred folds of high-hard dark metal steel and hard steel core had rusted into a dull, velvet gunmetal finish.
It was dark, oily, and fully non-shiny. It drank the light without bouncing a single photon back into the gloom.
Along the cutting edge ran a pale, smoky frost line. The natural hamon created by the differential clay tempering during the cold-well salt water cool. Above the frost line, the steel was tough and tough. Below it, the edge was sharpened to a terrifying, razor-sharp sharpness.
Pei Jing held a single strand of coarse black horsehair above the blade. That let it drop under its own weight.
The moment the hair touched the chisel head, it parted into two pieces without a sound.
A deep, bone-level chime rang through his skeletal system.
In his vision, the ledger flashed with bright, golden runes, breaking through the numerical ceiling of his martial foundation:
The breakthrough surged through his musculoskeletal frame like an electric discharge.
The deep muscle-sheath bands along his spine, hips, and calves tightened, contracting with the huge, stored potential energy of a heavy-duty coil spring. His resting stance lengthened by half an inch as his spine bones lined up along a true clockwork upright axis.
He could feel every ounce of the twenty-two-pound blade in his palms.
It was no longer an external piece of dead iron. It had become a rigid, functional extension of his radius and forearm bone, perfectly integrated into his moving chain.
Pei Jing lowered the blade, his breathing calm and steady.
“The teeth are ground,” Pei Jing said into the dusk.
Mo Tie walked over from the anvil shed. He held a finished handle assembly wrapped in dark rawhide.
“Then let’s put the skull on the beast,” the smith said.