The rain beat against the clay roof tiles of the Pei Clan Manor like a shower of thrown river gravel.
Inside the Great Ancestral Hall, the heavy oak storm shutters were barred from within with iron cross-latches. Four smoking animal fat fire bowls cast an unsteady, ochre light across the cedar rafters. It filled the damp room with the smell of wet wool, burning pine resin, and anxious human breath.
Seated around the massive redwood meeting table were eight men: Clan Head Pei Hongcheng, three senior clan elders, Captain Cao Dun of the compound guard, Second Son Pei Lang, and two warehouse stewards.
On the table lay three open ledger scrolls, their pages curling under the humid air.
“Fourteen days,” Pei Hongcheng said, his knuckles resting against the edge of the wood, his voice sounding older than his fifty-two years. “If the blockade holds, our flour and salted pork will be exhausted in fourteen days. The Black Tiger Gang has erected timber barricades across all four approaches to the Cross-Bazaar. This morning, they impounded two grain carts from the western agricultural hamlets and beat our draymen with iron gaffs.”
Pei Lang, his left arm bound in splints and white vinegar bandages, slammed his right fist onto the table.
“They’re starving us out!” Pei Lang roared, his bloodshot eyes darting between the elders. “Every hour we sit here, Hu Biao tightens the noose! Let me take twenty guards, two barrels of fish oil. Then they set fire to their timber yard on the North Wharf! We strike them before they bring their main force across the river!”
“Silence, boy!” shouted Second Uncle Pei Zhide, his pale, liver-spotted face trembling with anger.
Zhide was fifty-five years old, having spent his entire life managing the clan’s grain exchanges and leasehold contracts. He clutched an ebony counting frame in his lap as if it were a magic charm against swords.
“A counter-charge? With twenty guards?” Zhide spat, his voice rising in shrill panic. “Hu Biao has two hundred killers! He has the river cutthroats, the dock bruisers, and the backing of Patriarch Zhao! If we send our men into the streets, they will be surrounded and chopped into fish bait! And what happens when Zhao Cangshan brings the county court guards to declare us public rioters?”
Zhide turned toward Hongcheng, his hands shaking as he pointed toward the ceiling.
“Hongcheng, listen to reason! Zhao’s steward offered fifty silver coins and guaranteed peace if we transfer the lease of South Hill Shaft Two! It’s better to lose half our iron than to see our gates smashed and our women slaughtered! We must sign the promise!”
Third Elder Pei Shouzheng nodded grimly in agreement. “A live merchant can buy more land, Hongcheng. A dead clan leaves only bones.”
The room dropped into a choking, despairing silence.
The rain hammered against the shutters outside, an unceasing, rhythmic reminder of the world closing in on their outer edge.
The heavy double doors at the rear of the hall swung inward without a sound.
A cold draft of autumn rain and night air swept into the room, fluttering the candle flames and sending a chill across the elders’ ankles.
Pei Jing stepped over the raised threshold.
He wore a dark, sleeveless wool vest over a tight grey linen tunic, his forearms wrapped in black rawhide cords. His wet hair was tied neatly behind his head with a strip of cured sharkskin.
Across his back, wrapped in dark oiled linen, was the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
He walked past the row of ancestor tablets. His boots left faint, damp impressions on the scrubbed floorboards. His expression was as placid and unrushed as if he had just finished an afternoon balancing copper tallies in the counting house.
“Jing’er,” Hongcheng breathed, his brow furrowing. “You should be resting in the East Wing. Your shoulder—”
Pei Jing reached over his shoulder with his right hand.
He unslung the Cloud-Splitter, laying the three-point-two-foot weapon flat onto the center of the redwood table.
THUD.
The impact was heavy, dense, and solid as a falling tombstone.
The teacups rattled in their saucers. Zhide’s counting frame jumped two inches off his lap, three wooden counting beads sliding across the wire with a sharp clack.
The elders stared at the long, dark package. The shape beneath the oiled linen was massive, broad-headed, and menacing, streaming the cold, stone chill of hardened hard dark metal steel.
Pei Jing pulled a chair back, sitting opposite Second Uncle Zhide.
“You speak of signing covenants, Second Uncle,” Pei Jing said, his voice flat, low, and terrifyingly clear. “Have you audited the counterparty’s balance sheet?”
Zhide blinked, his mouth opening and closing like a landed carp. “The... The counterparty? What balance sheet? They have two hundred men! They have the river!”
“A ledger isn’t measured in gross bulk; it’s measured in liquid capital,” Pei Jing replied.
He leaned forward, placing both hands flat on the redwood table.
“I have spent the last three days auditing the Black Tiger Gang’s personnel deployment. Hu Biao boasts two hundred fighters. Of those two hundred, one hundred and seventy-five are dock porters, tavern debt-collectors, and river boatmen recruited for intimidation. They have no internal martial conditioning. Their nutrition is poor, their equipment consists of rusted gaffs and wooden truncheons, and their morale collapses the moment three men beside them lose limbs.”
Pei Jing raised his index finger.
“Twenty men have achieved basic Skin Tempering. They’re tough enough to ignore a wooden club, but their joints are stiff and their footwork is slow.”
He raised a second finger.
“Four men have achieved Flesh Forging: Scar-Faced Liu, Mountain Pig, and two squad leaders on the North Wharf. Mountain Pig has lost his right arm. Liu has a fractured sternal angle and can’t swing a blade with his right hand. That leaves two.”
He raised a third finger.
“Only Iron Claw Hu Biao has achieved Tendon Stretching Peak. He’s the sole enterprise asset that possesses true moving lethality.”
The room was fully silent.
Captain Cao Dun, an old guard post veteran with a scarred cheek, stared at Pei Jing with growing intensity.
“Third Young Master is correct,” Cao Dun murmured, leaning over his broadsword. “A mob of two hundred river rats isn’t an army. But on an open wharf, numbers allow them to encircle twenty guards from three sides.”
“Which is why we’ll not fight on an open wharf,” Pei Jing said.
He tapped the linen-wrapped spine of the Cloud-Splitter.
“Hu Biao’s working advantage exists only in wide, unconstrained spaces. If our twenty clan guards remain behind the compound walls, with crossbows manned along the low roof walls and boiling lime prepared at the gatehouse, fifty men can’t breach our timber doors.”
Pei Jing looked at his father.
“Don’t let a single guard leave this compound, Father. Bar the gates. Stockpile rain water. If gang scouts approach the walls, shoot them with hunting bows.”
“And what about the blockade?” Hongcheng asked, his voice strained. “If the guards stay inside, who breaks the barricades? Who secures the food?”
Pei Jing stood up.
He picked up the Cloud-Splitter, sliding the wide hemp strap over his left shoulder.
“In an open field, an army of two hundred defeats one man,” Pei Jing said. “In a maze of narrow, unlit alleys, two hundred men can’t advance at the same time. The width of a butcher’s lane is four feet. The width of a stone drainage ditch is three feet. Each lane admits exactly one blade at a time.”
His dark eyes swept the elders, cold as frost on an iron sickle.
“In a bottleneck, two hundred men aren’t an army. They’re a queue of single liabilities waiting to be audited.”
Second Uncle Zhide swallowed hard. “You... You intend to go out there alone? In the dark? In this rain?”
“A ledger doesn’t balance itself, Second Uncle,” Pei Jing replied.
He turned on his heel, walking out of the old family hall without waiting for their consent.
Ten minutes later, in his private quarters in the East Wing, Pei Jing completed his final working inventory.
He lit a small oil lamp, setting it on his drafting desk.
From a locked cedar cabinet, he retrieved his forearm wrist guard. An assembly of hardened carbon-steel plates mounted on oiled oxhide, housing twelve spring-loaded slots for six-inch throwing needles.
Beside the wrist guard sat a clay pot vial sealed with red beeswax, purchased three days earlier from Su Mei’er’s Vast Treasure Pavilion.
The vial contained an extract of wild aconite root mixed with fermented mountain wolf-bile. A dark, thick, sticky neurotoxin that blocked sodium ion channels in nervous tissue. When introduced into a bloodstream, it caused nearby muscular tetany within five seconds. It was followed by heart arrest within two minutes.
Pei Jing used a fine split-bamboo sliver to coat the three-sided chisel tips of all twelve steel needles with the dark, sticky resin.
He loaded the needles into the spring slots with twelve precise, metal clicks:
Tink. Tink. Tink.
Next, he took a heavy sharkskin pouch from his shelf. Inside were thirty four-pointed forged iron caltrops, each point two inches long, barbed like fish hooks. Whichever way a caltrop fell, one point always remained standing straight-across to the ground, designed to penetrate straw sandals and shatter the metatarsal bones of charging pursuers.
He secured the caltrop pouch to the left side of his sharkskin tool belt.
To his right side, he fastened the Black Mountain Whetstone in its oiled leather sheath.
Finally, he drank a large bowl of warm bear animal fat broth steeped with sliced mountain ginseng, fueling his stored energy reserves for the coming night-hunting hard effort.
In his vision, the monospace ledger flared with crisp, stone-grey characters:
Pei Jing pulled the hood of his dark wool cloak over his head, shielding his eyes from the storm.
He stepped out into the pouring autumn rain, scaled the ten-foot outer edge wall of the East Wing with a single, soundless tendon-whip leap. Then he vanished into the wet darkness of Cloudford Town.