The abandoned grain shed near the northern canal wharves was cold, dark, and thick with the smell of mildewed barley husks, wet cedar shingles, and stale river mud.
Rainwater dripped steadily through holes in the rotten roof. He tapped against the split-timber floorboards in an irregular, hollow rhythm. Outside, the wind howled through the willow trees along the canal bank. It carried the distant shouts of gang patrols searching the lower town.
Pei Jing stepped across the broken threshold of the shed.
He was bypassing the main canal road. There, Hu Biao’s men had erected a timber barricade heavy with iron boat hooks.
His boots touched the floorboards without a sound.
Three paces into the darkness, his smell senses—sharpened by months of body-energy conditioning—registered a subtle, chemical strange flaw in the damp air.
Beneath the smell of mildewed grain was a faint, sickly-sweet scent. Fermented viper venom mixed with dried aconite and heated sulfur.
Pei Jing didn’t freeze. Freezing was an admission that an ambush had succeeded.
He continued his forward stride. But his Python Tendon Stance shifted into a state of coiled, dynamic tension. His neck rotators and shoulder suspensory joint cords tightened, preparing for omnidirectional evasion.
Phuut.
The sound from the high rafters was faint—the soft, high-pressure expulsion of air from a hollow bamboo blowpipe.
A five-inch thorn dart, carved from black mountain thornwood and dipped in packed swamp-viper neurotoxin, whistled through the darkness at seventy feet per second.
Pei Jing’s head deflected two inches to the right.
The dart missed his main neck blood vessel by the thickness of a coin.
Yet the high-speed flight path was shallow. The sharp thorn grazed the lateral head of his left bicep, tearing a two-inch superficial furrow through his linen sleeve and slicing through the outer skin.
A sharp, stinging burn flared across his skin, followed right away by a cold, numbing sensation that spread like ice water.
Swamp-viper venom was a potent hemotoxin and neurotoxin, engineered by nature to dissolve tiny blood vessel walls, cause massive nearby black rot, and paralyze breathing motor neurons within three minutes.
Before the venom could enter the cephalic vein, Pei Jing’s physiology reacted.
Flesh Forging Tier 6 Limit-Break: physical Micro-Fibrillar Clamping.
Pei Jing didn’t panic. Panic raised heart rate, speeding up fluid-draining and dark-blood return.
He consciously suppressed his heart gaining speed, dropping his pulse to forty-four beats per minute.
At the same time, he sent a direct nerve command to the deep muscle-sheath envelope of his left upper arm.
The dense, limit-break muscle fibers of his upper arm muscle and brachialis tightened in a violent, nearby burst. The superficial tiny blood vessel beds and dark-blood plexuses around the jagged cut clamped shut like iron vices, fully strangling local blood flow.
The venom was trapped.
It was confined within a half-inch pocket of superficial adipose tissue, unable to cross the hermetically sealed muscular barrier into systemic breath flow.
“Now! Drop the iron net!” a shrill, raspy voice hissed from the rafters.
Two heavy thuds echoed on the floorboards as two muscular men dropped from the crossbeams eight paces behind Pei Jing.
They wore sleeveless sharkskin jerkins, their arms thick with scars. In their hands, they held an eight-foot circular throwing net, woven from double-braided hemp cord soaked in saltwater and ringed with fifty two-ounce forged iron sinkers.
With a coordinated snap of their shoulders, they hurled the net.
The weighted hemp swelled in the darkness like a striking spider’s web. It whistled through the air to engulf Pei Jing from head to heel.
An ordinary warrior, trapped beneath fifty iron weights and tangled hemp cords, would have struggled with his arms. That let the netting tighten around his joints until he was locked still for a headsman’s thrust.
Pei Jing didn’t fight the mesh with raw force.
He engaged Voluntary Joint Popped joint.
The weighted net settled over his head and shoulders. Then, pinning his left arm against his flank, Pei Jing exhaled.
He out-of-joint the first carpometacarpal joint of his left thumb.
Pop.
The saddle joint slipped from its socket in zero point four seconds. His left hand flattened, shrinking in transverse width by twenty-five percent.
Before the two net-throwers could haul the cinch lines tight, Pei Jing’s left hand slid through a four-inch diamond mesh opening with the smooth, zero-drag evasion of a water eel slipping through a weir.
His left foot drove into the oak floorboards.
His Achilles tendon snapped forward with the explosive recoil of a released trebuchet.
Pei Jing surged forward beneath the weight of the net. He dragged the iron sinkers along the timber floor in a shrieking scrape.
He reached the first net-thrower before the man could draw his belt knife.
Pei Jing’s right fist didn’t wind up.
He delivered a Short-Torque Tendon Release directly into the man’s solar nerve web.
WHUMP.
The bone-shaking blast wave shattered the xiphoid process, drove through the chest muscle. Then it stopped the man’s heart in mid-systole. The net-thrower collapsed like a marionette with cut strings, his eyes glassy in the dark.
The second net-thrower gasped, reaching for an iron hatchet at his hip.
Pei Jing pivoted on his right heel. That brought the heel of his left hand across in a level palm strike against the man’s temple.
CRACK.
The time bone fractured with a sound snap like a dry hazelnut shell. The second man crumpled sideways into a pile of grain sacks, motionless.
Two men dead in four seconds.
From the shadows beneath the rafters, a slender, hunched figure dropped to the floor, holding a long bamboo blowpipe in one hand and a six-inch poisoned stiletto in the other.
It was Poisoner Ma Liu.
Ma Liu was fifty years old, with yellow, rotting teeth, a face pocked with chemical acid burns, and hands stained black with viper bile. He was Hu Biao’s personal headsman, responsible for dozens of silent midnight murders along the Yun River.
Ma Liu stared at Pei Jing with bulging, disbelieving eyes.
“You... You took a dart from the Green-Scaled Viper,” Ma Liu whispered, his voice shaking with superstitious dread. “Why aren’t you vomiting black blood? Why haven’t your lungs collapsed?”
Pei Jing didn’t answer.
He shrugged his left shoulder. He used his Python Tendon Whip to toss the heavy iron net aside like a discarded coat.
His left thumb snapped back into its socket with a crisp clack.
He reached over his shoulder and drew the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
The twenty-two-pound hard dark metal blade cleared its sheath with a dry, hungry hiss.
“You’re fifty-four minutes late for your audit, Ma Liu,” Pei Jing said, his voice flat as a frozen pond.
Ma Liu shrieked in terror, lunging forward with his poisoned stiletto in a desperate, suicidal thrust aimed at Pei Jing’s throat.
Pei Jing didn’t block.
He stepped half a pace to the left, letting the stiletto whistle past his collar.
His core rotated. The twenty-two-pound hard dark metal blade dropped in a slanted cleave that carried the full mass of his body and the elastic recoil of his spinal whip.
SHING-CRACK.
The Cloud-Splitter struck Ma Liu at the juncture of the left neck and collar bone.
The twenty-eight-degree chisel edge sliced through bone, through the chest cavity, through the lungs and main heart artery. Then it sliced through the six-inch cured pine pillar behind him, burying itself three inches into the wall studs.
Ma Liu was split in two.
The cut halves of the poisoner fell to either side of the cut timber post, blood splashing across the grain sacks.
Pei Jing placed his boot against the wall, withdrawing the Cloud-Splitter with a smooth, linear pull.
The shed was silent.
Pei Jing walked over to a dry corner beside the grain bins. He sat down cross-legged on a clean cedar plank.
He laid the Cloud-Splitter across his knees.
Then he reached into his tool pouch, withdrawing a small bronze skinning knife and a baked-clay flask of seventy-percent grain alcohol.
He poured the alcohol over the steel blade of the knife, then splashed a mouthful over the jagged cut on his left bicep.
The wound stung with sharp, searing heat.
Pei Jing’s hand remained steady as an iron vise.
He gripped the skinning knife in his right hand. He looked down at the shallow wound. He saw the small, nearby lump of dark, purple-black tissue where the viper venom had been clamped by his muscle fibers.
He didn’t hesitate.
With two precise, razor-sharp incisions, Pei Jing excised the poisoned tissue—a piece of skin and fat under the skin the size of a copper coin.
A trickle of dark, clotted blood welled from the cut. It carried the leftover venom residue out of the wound.
Pei Jing took a piece of glowing charcoal from his small tin firebox. He pressed the red ember directly against the raw cut for two seconds.
Sssssssss.
The flesh sizzled, the smell of scorched skin filling the shed. The high heat instantly burned shut the cut tiny blood vessels, sealing the fluid-draining vessels and preventing infection.
Pei Jing didn’t grunt. He didn’t blink. His breathing remained slow and rhythmic, his pulse steady at forty-eight beats per minute.
Pain was merely living data. It showed that heat clotting had achieved blood-vessel closure.
He wrapped his bicep in clean, salted linen, tying the knot with his teeth.
Next, he walked over to Ma Liu’s cut corpse.
He searched the poisoner’s bamboo rucksack. He pulled out three sealed jars of distilled pine pitch, four clay pots of incendiary sulfur powder. An oiled silk letter bearing Iron Claw Hu Biao’s personal vermilion seal.
Pei Jing unfolded the letter beneath the moonlight filtering through the broken roof.
The letter contained the gang’s master working order for dawn:
At the fourth watch, twenty cutthroats under Scar-Faced Liu will stack pitch and oil-soaked timber beneath the wooden piers of the East Stone Bridge.
At first cockcrow, as the Pei Clan gathers at the bridge to negotiate the iron shipment, the bridge will be set ablaze, severing the town’s main escape route. Meanwhile, Hu Biao leads eighty armored fighters across the north ford to burn the Pei Clan Manor to the ground.
It was an extermination strategy.
Hu Biao had never intended to negotiate at the bridge. He intended to trap the entire clan inside a burning cul-de-sac.
Pei Jing’s eyes narrowed into two slits of cold grey slate.
“A fraudulent debt restructuring,” Pei Jing whispered into the darkness.
In his vision, the monospace ledger flared with crisp, lit up characters:
Pei Jing folded the silk letter into his belt pouch.
He drew the Black Mountain Whetstone from his gear roll. He set the dense dark rock slab against the twenty-eight-degree main edge of the Cloud-Splitter. He drew three light, measured passes down the chisel tip to dress away the lingering tiny burrs of combat.
He wiped the Cloud-Splitter clean with a handful of clean grain husks, returned the blade to its back sheath. Then he tightened his wool cloak.
He looked out through the shattered door toward the east. There, the grey dark shape of the East Stone Bridge spanned the roaring rapids of the Yun River.
The fire wouldn’t burn the bridge.
The bridge was where the audit would take place.