The black smoke rising from the South Hill smelting yards rose against the grey autumn sky like an overturned inkpot.
Five miles away on the dropping mountain path, Pei Jing could smell it. The pungent, greasy stench of boiling pine pitch, scorched hard coal, and the sour sulfur of burning kiln sheds.
He moved down the switchback trail at a steady, rhythmic lope.
With his newly unlocked Tier 3 Python Tendon Whip. His stride was neither was heavy nor labored. His feet touched the loose gravel with feline stretch. His Achilles tendons took in each landing and converting seventy percent of the ground energy into forward thrust.
The twenty-two-pound Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber, wrapped in dark oiled linen, rode diagonally across his back without shifting.
Ten minutes later, he reached the timber gate of the South Hill Kiln Yard.
The compound was a disaster zone.
Three heavy four-wheeled coal wagons lay overturned in the muddy ditch beside the access road, their split timber beds spilling twenty thousand pounds of high-grade hard coal into the clay. Two draught mules lay dead in the mud, their bellies torn open by iron boat gaffs.
Near the burning charcoal shed, two Pei Clan guards were bound to a splintered wagon wheel with wet hemp rope. Their leather jerkins were shredded, their faces swollen and purple with hematomas, blood dripping from deep cuts where three-pronged iron claws had raked across their shoulders.
At the entrance to the stone kiln office, Second Son Pei Lang stood with his back pressed against the heavy oak door.
Pei Lang was bareheaded, his teeth bared in an animal snarl. His right hand gripped his standard iron broadsword, its edge notched in three places and coated with dark, clotted blood. His left sleeve was torn away. He showed three jagged puncture wounds across his shoulder muscle where muscle fibers bulged through the torn skin.
Beside Pei Lang, three wounded kiln workers held iron scrapers and fire pokers, their chests heaving with desperate tiredness.
Surrounding them in a loose semicircle were eleven cutthroats from the Black Tiger Gang.
They wore greased buffalo-hide vests, their faces smeared with soot and coal dust. Five carried four-foot iron-banded cudgels. Three held curved boat gaffs. Two held clay pot jars of boiling pine pitch, ready to hurl them through the office windows.
At their front stood Scar-Faced Liu.
Liu’s chest was tightly wrapped in vinegar-soaked linen bandages beneath his leather vest—the lingering consequence of Pei Jing’s three-inch tendon snap on the river wharf three days earlier. He breathed with a faint, wheezing rattle, his face drawn and pale.
In his left hand, Liu brandished a heavy, serrated butcher’s cleaver, three pounds of rusted pig iron with a bone handle.
“Break the door down!” Liu snarled, his betel-stained teeth flecked with spittle. “Throw the pitch inside! Burn the office, burn the payroll books, and break Pei Lang’s legs! Iron Claw Hu Biao wants the Pei family crawling to the docks on their bellies before sunset!”
Two thugs stepped forward, uncorking the pitch jars.
Footsteps sounded from the gravel road behind them.
They weren’t the wild, thundering boots of a relieving guard post. They were the slow, measured footsteps of a man walking into a courtyard to inspect a delivery of lumber.
“You’re increasing your liabilities, Liu,” a flat, unrushed voice said through the drifting smoke.
The eleven gang members spun around, their weapons coming up in defensive reflexes.
Pei Jing walked through the smashed timber gate.
He wore his faded grey homespun robe, the sleeves tied back with hemp cords to expose his corded, tendon-stretched forearms. Across his back, the long, linen-wrapped package rested quietly.
His eyes swept the yard, cataloging the scene in two seconds:
Two dead draught mules: asset loss, eighteen silver coins.
Three overturned wagons: load-bearing repair, five silver coins.
One burned charcoal shed: replacement timber, twelve silver coins.
Four wounded clan members: medical balms and bone-setting, four silver coins.
Total property and living damage: thirty-nine silver coins.
The debt was compounding.
“It’s the third son!” one of the pitch-throwers yelled, his voice cracking with sudden nervousness. “The one from the docks who broke Liu’s ribs!”
Liu squinted through the charcoal smoke, his hand instinctively clamping over his bandaged chest bone. A flare of poisonous hatred twisted his scarred face. But beneath the hatred was a cold, gut twitch of mortal fear.
“Kill him!” Liu screamed, pointing his serrated cleaver at Pei Jing’s chest. “There’s only one of him! He has no armor! Spear his belly and drown him in the pitch!”
The largest cutthroat in the squad—a seven-foot brute nicknamed Mountain Pig, wearing a double-layered buffalo-hide cuirass and wielding a forty-pound iron-heavy oak heavy club—roared with fury.
Mountain Pig charged down the gravel slope, his heavy iron-shod boots tearing through the mud.
He swung the forty-pound heavy club with both hands, an overhead headsman’s blow designed to smash a man’s skull down between his collarbones.
Pei Jing didn’t draw back.
His left hand reached over his shoulder, gripping the sharkskin handle of the Cloud-Splitter.
With a single fluid pull, he drew the blade.
The dark oiled linen shredded away in two clean strips, fluttering into the soot like dead grey moth wings.
The Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber emerged into the daylight.
Three point two feet of dark, matte-charcoal hard dark metal steel. The double fullers caught the orange glare of the burning charcoal shed. The high-carbon cutting edge gleamed with a cold, hungry frost line.
Pei Jing didn’t block with the flat.
He engaged the Gale Saber: Cleaving the Riverbank.
His right heel drove into the gravel. His pelvis rotated, and his spinal muscle tissue let loose twenty-two pounds of hardened steel along an upward slanted flight path.
SHING-CRACK.
The crash of weapons was not a contest of strength. It was a test of moving physics.
The Cloud-Splitter’s tiny hard dark metal spine struck the forty-pound oak heavy club. The seasoned wood and iron bands didn’t deflect the blade. They were snapped clean in twain, split apart as if they were dried bamboo reeds.
The stroke didn’t lose driving force.
The flared four-inch chisel head continued its upward arc. It passed through the cut wood and struck Mountain Pig’s right forearm at the elbow joint.
Ssshh-clack.
The twenty-eight-degree chisel edge sliced through muscle, cut the ulnar artery, and sliced cleanly through both the radius and forearm bone without biting or binding in the bone.
Mountain Pig’s right forearm and half of his cut heavy club spun through the air. He splashed into the mud six paces away.
The giant stared at the bloody stump of his elbow in dumb, impossible to understand shock for half a second.
Then the painful nerve blast wave hit his brain. He shrieked like a slaughtered hog, collapsing into the mud and clutching his spurting arm with his left hand.
Pei Jing didn’t look at the screaming brute.
He stepped past the falling giant with Silent Footwork, his balance point low and stable.
The leftover ten cutthroats stood frozen. Their eyes were locked on the dark, velvet-grey blade in Pei Jing’s hands.
A weapon that could sever a four-inch iron-banded club and a man’s arm in a single stroke was not a sword. It was an engine of decapitation.
“Run!” one of the pitch-throwers shrieked, dropping his terracotta jar.
The jar shattered on the stones, splashing boiling pitch across his own sandals. He turned and bolted toward the road, screaming in terror.
Three other thugs threw down their gaffs and scrambled over the ditch. They clawed through the mud in a desperate frenzy to escape.
“Stand your ground, you cowards!” Liu roared, swinging his serrated cleaver with his left hand. “Surround him! He’s too heavy to recover after a swing!”
Liu was wrong.
A normal warrior swinging a twenty-two-pound blade would have been dragged off-balance by outward-pulling heavy rush. That left his ribs exposed for two full seconds.
Pei Jing’s Python Tendon Whip removed heavy rush lag.
The upward stroke cleared Mountain Pig’s shoulder. Then, Pei Jing’s broad back muscles tightened, reversing the vector. The Cloud-Splitter spun in a tight level figure-eight, the handle knob turning around his wrist like the hub of a spinning flywheel.
Thunk.
The flat of the heavy brass handguard struck the nearest gaff-bearer across the jaw.
The cutthroat’s head snapped sideways with a sound crack. Five teeth flew out in a spray of blood. The man collapsed unconscious onto the gravel before his weapon hit the ground.
Pei Jing took two steps forward.
The leftover four cutthroats threw their weapons into the dirt. They dropped to their knees with their hands raised, trembling so wildly that their teeth clicked.
Only Scar-Faced Liu remained standing.
Liu backed up against the wheel of an overturned coal wagon. His boots slid in the spilled hard coal. His eyes were wide with animal panic, his chest heaving with desperate, rattling gasps as his bandaged ribs screamed with pain.
He raised his three-pound butcher’s cleaver with a trembling left hand.
“Stay back... Stay back, you devil...” Liu stammered, his voice choked with soot and terror. “Hu Biao has two hundred men... Hu Biao will skin you alive...”
Pei Jing stepped forward.
He didn’t rush. He didn’t raise his blade high.
He simply extended his right arm, resting the cold, velvet-grey chisel tip of the Cloud-Splitter against the left side of Liu’s neck, right over the main neck blood vessel.
The weight of the twenty-two-pound blade pressed against the scarred skin.
A single bead of bright crimson blood welled from the micro-fine edge, tracing a thin red line down Liu’s dirty collar.
Liu froze. He didn’t dare swallow. He didn’t dare breathe.
The steel against his throat was cold as river ice. It smelled of sulfur, oak gall, and fresh iron slurry.
“Thirty-nine silver coins of property damage,” Pei Jing said softly, his voice cutting through the crackle of the burning shed. “Four wounded clan members. Two dead draught animals.”
He looked into Liu’s dilated pupils.
“Your gang’s account is deeply overdrawn, Liu. The interest has matured. The principal must be settled.”
Liu’s knees shook, his butcher’s cleaver slipping from his numb fingers and clattering harmlessly into the coal dust.
“Don’t... Don’t kill me...” Liu whispered, his voice trembling like a dying candle. “I only carry orders... It’s Hu Biao... Hu Biao made the deal with Patriarch Zhao...”
“I know,” Pei Jing said.
He withdrew the blade three inches from Liu’s throat, turning the flat of the weapon toward the road.
“Take your wounded men and your cut limbs,” Pei Jing said, his tone devoid of passion. “Crawl back to the river docks. Tell Hu Biao that the Pei Clan’s iron won’t rust in the mud. Tell him that on the first dawn of next week, I’ll come to the East Stone Bridge to audit his books.”
Pei Jing’s eyes narrowed slightly, dark and cold as well water.
“Tell him to bring his three-pronged claws. And tell him to bring his neck.”
Liu didn’t ask twice.
With a wild, sobbing whimper, the scarred guard scrambled backward over the coal wagon, grabbed the screaming Mountain Pig by his belt. Then he dragged the mutilated giant down the mountain road. He was followed by the scattering survivors.
The kiln yard fell silent, save for the crackle of the burning shed and the hiss of steam from the water chutes.
Pei Lang staggered forward from the office doorway, his broadsword dragging in the dirt. He stared at the cut iron heavy club on the ground, then looked at the massive, dark weapon resting in his brother’s hands.
“Jing’er...” Pei Lang breathed, his voice thick with wonder and dread. “In heaven’s name... What kind of weapon is that?”
In Pei Jing’s eye field, the monospace ledger lit up with a crisp, sharp-angled glow:
Pei Jing reached down, picking up a piece of clean linen from a tool basket. Then he wiped the single drop of blood from the chisel head. Before securing the cleaver, he reached into his waist pouch and drew the Black Mountain Whetstone. He ran the dark stone twice along the left edge with a quiet rasp to verify no micro-burr had formed against the iron heavy club, then slid the weapon smoothly into its shoulder sword sheath.
“A balancing tool, Second Brother,” Pei Jing replied. “The ledger has been opened.”