A tremor started in the deep flexor muscles of Pei Jing’s right forearm, then migrated up into the shoulder muscle.
It wasn’t a tremor born of fear. It was the clockwork shudder of an engine starved of fuel. The human body, reduced to its heat-powered baseline, was a fire burning hydrocarbons and nitrogenous compounds. When the fuel injectors ran dry, the burning chambers began to burn their own lining.
Pei Jing sat on the split-pine bench under the drafty roof edge of the West Pavilion. His back was pressed against the mud-brick wall. He pressed two fingers against his wrist blood vessel.
Ninety-four beats per minute. Tachycardia. The heart was pumping faster to circulate what little glucose remained in his star-fire. His palms were clammy, coated in a cold, oily sweat that smelled faintly of acetone. The classic byproduct of ketosis and sped up protein tissue breakdown.
Before his eyes, the floating sight screen held steady in dark slate monochrome:
“A deficit of six thousand two hundred kilocalories,” Pei Jing spoke into the cold morning air.
His voice was flat, level, stripped of panic. In fourteen years of reviewing corporate insolvency, panic had never recovered a single stolen copper cash or balanced a fraudulent ledger. The numbers didn’t negotiate with sentiment. If an asset column dropped below running costs, the business collapsed. If body energy intake fell below synthesis requirements, the host body burned up its own heart and chest muscle to maintain brain perfusion.
The coarse millet porridge Aunt Fang provided each morning supplied roughly eight hundred calories. A boiled turnip added perhaps thirty. A bowl of salted cabbage water offered trace minerals and sodium, but zero usable fats.
To sustain Tier 1 of Skin Tempering—and to gather the daily ten percent toward Tier 2—he needed eight thousand calories every twenty-four hours.
More importantly, he needed load-bearing raw materials. Dense soaked animal fats to rebuild cellular membranes, complete animal proteins rich in glycine and proline to synthesize connective tissue, and bioavailable calcium and phosphorus to maintain bone stone thickness under moving load.
Millet porridge couldn’t produce bone thick, horn-hard. Grass couldn’t forge iron tendons.
Pei Jing stood up. The sudden shift in deep water pressure caused a brief visual grey-out, a warning from his neck-artery baroreceptors. He rested his palm against the rough pine post for four heartbeats. He allowed dark-blood return to stabilize, then walked inside his living quarters.
The room smelled of dry pine needles and damp earth.
In the corner sat the battered hardwood chest. He flipped the latch and pushed back the lid.
Inside lay three tools of survival inherited from the original host’s grandfather. An old hunter who had died of winter lung rot five years prior.
First: the sixty-pound recurve hunting bow. The stave was built from five laminations of mountain ash bonded with boiled fish bladder glue, heavy at the belly with thin strips of water buffalo horn. Pei Jing ran his callused thumb down the limbs. The horn plates were intact, free of delamination or transverse fractures. The bowstring was three-ply twisted hemp, coated in beeswax that had turned brittle with age.
Pei Jing opened a small clay crock on the shelf, scooped out a dollop of yellow sheep fat. Then he began rubbing it into the dry cord.
The friction warmed the wax. The fibers softened under his fingers, drinking the animal fat until the hemp turned supple and dark amber.
He braced the lower recurve against the inside of his left ankle, gripped the handle with his left hand. Then he pushed the upper limb downward with the heel of his right palm while slipping the string loop into the horn nock. The ash wood bent with a stiff, dry groan.
The draw weight was about sixty pounds at twenty-eight inches. For a normal sixteen-year-old youth suffering from chronic malnutrition, stringing such a weapon would have been impossible. But Pei Jing’s right collar bone had fully knit. The thick, horn-hard on his knuckles provided an anchor point that didn’t blister under cord tension.
He reached back into the chest and drew out the quiver.
Seven hunting arrows. The shafts were straight-grained birch, fletched with goose feathers tied down with black thread. The points were heavy iron broadheads, three-sided and barbed, forged from low-grade bog iron. Each point was dark, coated in stale suet to prevent rusting.
Pei Jing tapped each head against the edge of his thumbnail. The iron was soft compared to modern carbon steel, but it held a working edge.
Next came the blades.
The eight-inch mountain chopper—the pig-iron cleaver he had carried during his first morning in the alley—lay beside an antler-handled skinning knife.
He picked up the skinning knife. The blade was five inches long, drop-point profile, forged from a discarded carriage spring. Its edge was dull, rolled over from years of scraping animal hides without proper upkeep.
Pei Jing sat cross-legged on the floor. From beneath his hemp mattress, he drew out the Black Mountain Whetstone.
The eight-inch dark rock slab was cool, dense, and fine-grained. He poured four drops of cold well water onto its grey surface. He set the knife blade at an eighteen-degree angle. Then he started the stroke.
Shhh-krrr. Shhh-krrr. Shhh-krrr.
Ten strokes along the right side, heel to tip. Ten strokes along the left side, tip to heel.
The sound tone changed within three minutes, rising from a coarse scrape to a crisp, high-hum. The Black Mountain dark rock cut away the rolled burr, exposing fresh iron crystals.
Pei Jing tested the belly of the blade against the hair on his left forearm. Three hairs snapped cleanly at the root without dragging.
He sheathed the knife in its cracked leather sword sheath and slipped it into his right boot. The iron chopper went into his hemp rope belt, resting flat against his left hip where it wouldn’t bounce during a sprint.
Lastly, he turned out the seams of his sleeve.
Eight copper cash.
Eight circular coins of cast bronze with square holes in the center, worn smooth by decades of peasant commerce.
Eight copper cash would purchase three pounds of pork fat from Butcher He at the eastern market. That fat would provide about nine thousand calories—enough to balance today’s ledger.
And tomorrow?
Tomorrow the account would stand at zero again. In three days, Butcher He’s apprentices would chase him from the stall with cleaver handles when his pockets turned up lint.
“Trading liquid cash for daily consumables is negative cash flow,” Pei Jing murmured. “A business that liquidates capital reserves to pay electric bills enters bankruptcy within one quarter.”
The forest was capital. The wolves, deer, and horned boars grazing in the high crags were unharvested inventory.
He secured the quiver across his back, slung the recurve bow over his left shoulder. Then he closed the wooden door of the West Pavilion.
The morning mist lay thick over Cloudford Town.
He walked past the neglected plum orchard and slipped through the gap in the manor’s western wall. At the sixth watch of the morning, the town alleys were quiet, save for the rhythmic clatter of night-soil carts and the smell of sulfur-rich coal smoke drifting from the iron foundries along the riverbank.
To the north, the foothills of Mount Cang rose into the grey sky like the jagged spine of a buried reptile. The low ridges were covered in scrub oak and yellowed weeds. But beyond the third ridge, the tree line shifted to dense, dark stands of ancient black pine.
Locals called it the Black Pine Forest.
It wasn’t a peaceful place. The mountain passes acted as a natural wind tunnel, funneling freezing air down from the northern glaciers into the granite gorges. More significantly, it was the hunting ground of pack hunting beasts pushed south by the early autumn snows.
Pei Jing calculated his transit metrics as he reached the mountain path:
Distance to the timberline: six li. Height gain: eight hundred feet. Pace: four li per hour under fifteen pounds of gear. Estimated energy cost for transit: four hundred and twenty kilocalories.
Every footstep was an expense line item. To prevent wasteful upright back-and-forth swing, he shifted his gait, driving forward from his glutes and hamstrings rather than pushing off his toes. His boots—patched straw sandals heavy with strips of old linen—gripped the damp slate path with dull, steady thuds.
Halfway up the second ridge, the town below shrunk to a grid of damp grey tile roofs bisected by the muddy ribbon of the Cloudford River.
Pei Jing paused beneath a wind-stunted juniper tree. He drew a deep breath through his nose, filtering the cold mountain air across his turbinates to warm it before it struck his lung tubes.
The air smelled different here. The stench of coal melted rock waste, sewage, and rotting sesame mash was replaced by the sharp, acidic tang of wet granite, decaying pine humus. The faint, musky scent of animal urine carried on the updraft.
His stomach tightened with a heard, cramping burst.
A sharp pulse of pain radiated from his solar nerve web to his spine. The stored energy stores in his liver were near zero. His muscles were crying out for adenosine triphosphate. If he didn’t secure a high-fat, high-protein harvest before the sun crossed the spirit vein, his core heat would begin to drop. The ledger would register its first reflex debit: body atrophy.
Pei Jing reached into his pouch, took out a thumb-sized piece of dried salt turnip. Then he placed it beneath his tongue. The salt stimulated his salivary glands, counteracting the dehydration caused by rapid breathing. Meanwhile, the trace sodium supported nerve heat flow across his motor endplates.
He adjusted the bow across his shoulder, lowered his balance point. Then he crossed the threshold into the dark shadow of the black pines.
The hunt had begun.