For five days, the sky above Cloudford Town remained a ceiling of low, leaden clouds.
The First Branch’s response to Zhang Qiang’s broken ankle was predictably office. On the seventh day, a summons had been nailed to the elm gate of the West Pavilion, demanding Pei Jing’s appearance before the Clan Disciplinary Hall.
Pei Hongcheng had intervened.
The patriarch of the Second Branch had walked into the main old family hall wearing his soot-stained mine coat. He carried the original ink receipts for the autumn grain shipment and a chunk of raw iron ore. He had placed both on the elders’ dark wood conference table, along with a blunt statement:
If the First Branch wished to flog his third son for defending the family’s purchased grain against a debt-bound servant, the Second Branch would cease running the drainage pumps in the southern iron mine before the winter freeze.
Without the pumps, the shaft would flood within forty-eight hours, destroying twelve thousand silver coins worth of timber wooden props and drowning the clan’s sole leftover revenue source.
The elders had choked on their tea. The summons was quietly rescinded. The matter was referred to a “joint office review” scheduled for the first day of the coming month.
Pei Jing had ignored the politics entirely.
Political maneuvers were risky derivatives. They fluctuated on fear, leverage, and rhetoric. The only asset with intrinsic value was physical force multiplied by clockwork smooth speed.
For five days, he had kept his two-hour daily load at four in the morning. He was followed by three hours of tool upkeep and eight hours of deep sleep.
Day six: seventy percent. Day seven: eighty percent. Day eight: ninety percent. Day nine: one hundred percent of the preliminary conditioning.
And now, on the morning of the tenth day, the final second of his focused training elapsed beneath a light flurry of early winter snow.
The stone-slate HUD flared against his vision with a deep, chiseled permanence:
The breakthrough was not a mental epiphany. It was a reflex deep physical change in his physical tissue.
A sensation of boiling oil surged from his lower belly, rushing down his main thigh blood vessels and branching through the micro-tiny blood vessels of his hands and feet.
Pei Jing looked down at his fists.
The skin covering the first two knuckles—the main striking points of the fist—had fully transformed. The soft, pale outer skin of a neglected clan youth had hardened into a thick, yellowish thick, horn-hard, resembling the dense horn-protein shell of a mountain tortoise.
He pressed the index knuckle of his right hand with his left thumbnail. The horn-protein didn’t yield. Beneath the surface, the outer bone of the hand bone had thickened by an estimated thirty percent, the calcium matrix fusing into a nonstop shock-scattering plate.
His left collar bone gave a final, dull pulse of warmth. The fracture line had fully stone-hardened, heavy by the body’s systemic gaining speed until the healed bone was thicker than the uninjured right side.
“Novice rank,” Pei Jing whispered. His voice was steady, puffs of white steam condensing in the freezing air. “Ten days. Twenty hours of deliberate physical load.”
In traditional martial halls, an apprentice spent twelve to eighteen months grinding the horse stance before a teacher deemed his knuckles sufficiently conditioned to strike sandbags. Half of those apprentices quit due to chronic wrist inflammation or bone-marrow bruising.
The Ledger had bypassed twelve months of uneven human trial and error. It packed the adaptation into two hundred and forty hours of living accounting.
Now came the audit of the output.
In the southwest corner of the West Pavilion courtyard, half-buried in dead weeds and frozen mud, lay an abandoned granite millstone.
It had belonged to the compound’s old grain press, discarded two decades ago. Just then, the river floods had cracked the wooden spindle. It was two feet in width, eight inches thick, cut from solid Blue Mountain granite—an igneous rock rich in quartz and pink rock, notorious for blunting iron chisels.
It weighed about two hundred and twenty pounds.
Pei Jing walked across the frosted gravel and stood before the millstone.
He didn’t adopt an exaggerated martial pose. He didn’t shout. He didn’t circulate fictional qi through nonexistent spirit veins.
He planted his feet shoulder-width apart, the soles of his bare feet sinking slightly into the frozen ground. His balance point lowered until his pelvis was locked in neutral posture with his lower-back spine.
Vector One: The Piston Thrust.
He drew his right fist back to his hip, elbow grazing the lower ribs.
In his mind, he reviewed the clockwork equation:
Mass of the upper body: forty-eight pounds. Spinning speed of the pelvis: blinding speed. Linear extension of the arm: 0.65 meters. Impact surface area: four square inches (the thick, calloused knuckles).
“Force equals mass times gaining speed,” he murmured. “Pressure equals force divided by surface area.”
He released the strike.
His rear foot drove into the frozen earth, displacing a spray of dirt. His right hip snapped forward in thirty split seconds, pulling the broad back muscles into full stretch. The arm shot straight, the fist rotating from palm-up to palm-down at the final tiny fraction of an inch before contact.
THUD-CRACK.
The sound was not the dull slap of flesh meeting stone. It was the sharp, sound report of a cold chisel driven by an eight-pound sledgehammer.
Pei Jing didn’t bounce back. His newly conditioned skeletal posture absorbed the recoil, channeling the bone-shaking blast wave down his spinal column, through his braced glutes, and scattering it harmlessly into the earth beneath his heels.
For three seconds, nothing moved.
Pei Jing drew his fist back.
The skin on his knuckles was dusted with grey granite powder. There was no blood. There was no tearing of the skin. The thick, horn-hard showed only a slight indentation that smoothed out within heartbeats. Tiny blood vessel blood surged into the tissue.
Then, across the surface of the two-hundred-pound granite millstone, a dark line appeared.
It started at the exact point of impact. A crater half an inch deep where the rock had been crushed into white dust. From that center, a jagged fracture propagated outward, splitting the quartz crystals like dry cedar.
CRACK.
The millstone divided cleanly into two halves, the upper section sliding off the granite base and thumping into the frozen mud.
Pei Jing inspected the fracture face.
The break was sharp, granular, following the natural cleavage plane of the stone.
“Striking power checked,” he noted. “Impact signal smooth speed: ninety-one percent. Bone strength: optimal.”
Then the bill arrived.
A sudden, terrifying wave of cold washed through his chest cavity.
Pei Jing’s knees buckled. He caught himself on the hardwood practice post, his left arm shaking wildly as his core heat plummeted.
In his vision, the stone-slate HUD began to strobe in rapid, urgent intervals:
His stomach didn’t merely growl. It felt as though an iron claw had seized his intestines, twisting them around his spinal column. The sped up synthesis of the thick, horn-hard and the mineralization of his collar bone had drained every leftover gram of stored protein and stone from his bloodstream.
His breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. His vision flickered with grey static.
He knew this sickness. On Earth, extreme athletes running ultra-marathons experienced it when stored energy depletion forced the liver into gluconeogenesis—metabolizing skeletal muscle to prevent heart arrest.
The Ledger had delivered on its contract. It had given him one hundred percent of the Novice rank. But it was an accounting engine, not a charitable foundation. It needed physical assets to balance the balance sheet.
If he tried to begin Tier 2 on coarse millet porridge and salt turnips, his body would cannibalize its own internal organs.
“I need meat,” Pei Jing muttered, his teeth clattering from the body-energy chill. “Dense animal fat. Bone marrow. High-protein fuel.”
He staggered into his quarters.
From the hardwood chest, he retrieved the notched iron mountain chopper and the antler-handled skinning knife, both now sharpened to a shaving edge on the Black Mountain Whetstone.
He took down the old hunting bow that had belonged to his grandfather. A sixty-pound recurve bow made of layered ash and horn, its string dry and stiff. He checked the horn nocks. They were sound. In the quiver were seven broadhead arrows, their iron tips blackened with old animal fat to prevent rust.
He checked his pocket.
Eight copper cash remained.
Eight copper cash could buy two pounds of fatty pork belly at the town butcher’s stall. That would buy him twenty-four hours of survival. But tomorrow, the body-energy bill would come again. And the day after that.
Purchasing food with clan coppers was a losing game. The burn rate was too high. The liquidity was zero.
He had to generate his own capital.
Pei Jing strapped the chopper to his waist with a strip of raw hemp rope, slung the recurve bow over his right shoulder. Then he tucked the skinning knife into his boot.
He walked out of the West Pavilion, heading past the dead plum trees toward the mountain trail behind Cloudford Town.
Ahead of him, five li to the north, the Black Pine Forest rose into the misty crags of the foothills. A dense, hunting beast-infested wilderness where wild mountain wolves, horned boars, and iron-scaled pit vipers roamed between the granite ridges.
Mortal hunters from the town rarely ventured beyond the second ridge. The survival rate in the winter months was less than fifty percent.
Pei Jing pulled his coarse wool collar tight against the freezing wind.
“A deficit can’t be reasoned with,” he said, stepping onto the rocky path. “It must be settled in full.”