The heat dropped four degrees the moment the canopy closed overhead.
Black pines grew eighty feet tall in this sector of the Cang Mountain foothills, their trunks straight as ship masts. Their bark cracked into was dark, six-sided plates resembling tortoise armor. Overhead, the needle canopy was so dense that daylight filtered down not as golden rays, but as a diffuse, slate-grey twilight. The ground underfoot was soft. A foot-thick mattress of decomposing pine needles that swallowed the sound of footsteps like sheep’s fleece.
Pei Jing halted ten paces inside the tree line.
He didn’t rush. A hunter who rushed through unfamiliar hunting beast territory was simply mobile meat delivering itself to the slaughterhouse.
He rested the lower limb of the ash recurve bow against his left thigh, lowered his chin. Then he closed his eyes.
He began a sound and smell baseline audit.
To his right, thirty paces away, water trickled over cold shale—a seasonal run-off stream from the upper snowfields. The sound was rhythmic, uninterrupted by the splash of heavy limbs. To his front, the wind blew down the mountain at about three meters per second, rustling the high pine boughs with a dry, hissing sigh.
The wind was in his face. That was a working asset. His scent—stale sweat, boiled millet, and sheep fat—was carried behind him, away from whatever game occupied the slope ahead.
Before moving deeper into the shadows, he stepped toward the edge of the runoff stream.
Along the wet gravel bank, nestled beneath a rotting cedar log, grew a cluster of low, arrow-shaped green leaves veined in dull purple. Pei Jing knelt, drawing the five-inch antler-handled skinning knife from his boot.
He drove the edge into the black loam two inches from the stem, levering upward.
A knobby, stringy rhizome emerged—wild mountain ginger. Its outer skin was ringed like an earthworm, coated in sticky clay. He sliced a sliver from the tip with his thumbnail. Then, a sharp, pungent aroma of bitter pine-resin, citrus, and raw heat cut through the cold air.
He scraped away the soil with the knife spine and placed a coin-sized slice into his mouth.
He chewed slowly.
The raw ginger root burned his tongue with intense chemical heat. Gingerols and shogaols surged across his oral mucosa, firing the trigeminal nerve and sending a wave of vasodilation down his throat-pipe. His stomach, which had been knotted into a tight cramp from stored energy depletion, relaxed as gastric blood flow increased. The spice didn’t provide calories, but it stimulated bile production, reduced smooth muscle spasms. Then he raised his outer skin heat by half a degree.
He slipped the remainder of the ginger rhizome into his hemp belt pouch.
Before securing the knife, his fingers found the Black Mountain Whetstone resting in his belt pouch. He thumbed the cold dark rock groove. He drew the skinning knife’s edge across the stone’s wet face three times until the edge bit clean into his thumbprint. He wiped the steel clean on his coarse wool trouser leg, sheathed it. Then he returned to the pine needle bed.
To an untrained eye, the forest floor was an unbroken carpet of reddish-brown needles. But to a mind trained to spot discrepancies in seven-column financial registers, anomalies were obvious.
Four feet ahead, the needle bed was tightly packed.
Pei Jing knelt on his right knee. He set the iron chopper flat against his thigh so the sword sheath wouldn’t clatter against granite. He leaned close, his nose six inches from the depression.
The print was oval, three and a half inches wide, four inches long. Four distinct digital pads were pressed into the loam, each tipped by the mark of a blunt, non-retractile claw.
Mountain grey wolf.
Pei Jing touched the soil inside the heel pad depression.
The soil was damp, but loose needles had not yet rolled back into the trough. The edges of the claw impressions remained crisp, showing no erosion from the morning mist.
“Transit time: under two hours,” Pei Jing murmured. “Estimated mass: thirty-eight to forty-two pounds.”
He checked the immediate outer edge. Two more prints appeared to the left, slightly smaller. It was followed by a fourth depression where the animal had pivoted to scent a rotted birch stump.
Then came a second set of prints, spaced five feet apart, overlapping the first track.
And a third set, ten paces further uphill, moving in parallel along the contour of the ridge.
Three hunting beasts. Moving in tactical formation: one point scout, two flankers trailing fifteen paces back.
A grey pulse flickered across Pei Jing’s eye.
Pei Jing paused, reading the slate characters with measured calm distance.
The Ledger didn’t merely record combat arts. It registered any complex, repeatable discipline governed by measurable physical laws. Tracking animal spoor was nothing more than careful reconstruction. Gathering physical artifacts, calculating spatial trajectories, determining mass and speed, and extrapolating behavioral patterns.
“Two hours of deliberate tracking to establish the first baseline,” he noted. “Accepted.”
He stood, keeping his knees slightly bent to maintain a low balance point.
He didn’t follow the tracks directly down the line of scent. That was an amateur’s error. Hunting beasts often circled back along their own back-trail to ambush trailing pursuers from higher height.
Instead, Pei Jing angled thirty degrees to the west. He used an exposed spine of grey granite crags as a watching platform.
The rock was slippery with black lichen. But the thick, horn-hard on his hands and the heavy soles of his straw sandals found purchase on the quartz nodules. Every ten paces, he stopped, scanning the terrain in fifteen-degree sectors from left to right.
His vision, enhanced by the completion of Tier 1 Skin Tempering, processed high-contrast edges with remarkable clarity.
On an old fallen cedar sixty paces uphill, the grey moss was scraped away at a height of eighteen inches. A smear of dark grey grease clung to the rough wood. Pei Jing approached in a low crouch, staying beneath the ridgeline.
He scraped a sliver of the grease with his thumbnail and brought it to his nose.
Musk. Dense, oily gland secretions mixed with the smell of wet fur and digested carrion. The hair caught in the sap was coarse, two inches long, banded in grey and dirty white.
The slate HUD in his vision ticked forward:
He continued tracking up the drainage ravine.
The terrain steepened. Loose shale gave way to sheer granite shelves where mountain springs had frozen into slick sheets of clear ice. Pei Jing’s calves burned. The heat deficit he carried from the morning began to manifest as a persistent, dull ache behind his temples—a living alarm from his brain cells signaling falling glucose reserves.
He ignored the pain. Pain was tracking data. It told him he had about ninety minutes of high-intensity motor coordination leftover before hypoglycemia impaired his reaction speeds.
He studied the subtle shifts in the foliage. Where deer passed, twigs were snapped from above by dropping bellies. Where wolves passed, branches were pushed aside at the hip line. That left bent needles pointing in the direction of travel. He noted a patch of crushed wild chives, bruised less than forty minutes ago, their allicin scent still fresh in the still air.
At the head of the ravine. There, the granite split into a narrow box canyon choked with scrub alder, he found fresh droppings.
The scat was dark, tube-shaped, containing undigested deer hair and white shards of splintered bone. Steam still rose from the core, drifting into the cold mountain air.
“Five minutes,” he calculated. “Distance: under two hundred paces.”
He checked the wind. The breeze had shifted slightly to the northeast, drafting down the funnel of the box canyon.
If he entered the canyon floor, the wolves would scent him before he cleared the alder thicket. In close brush, the recurve bow would be useless. The six-foot wingspan of the ash limbs would foul on branches. That left him with only the five-inch skinning knife and the iron chopper against three forty-kilo carnivores.
Pei Jing chose the high ground.
He scrambled up the western chimney of the canyon wall, jamming the hardened edges of his palms into granite cracks. His thick, calloused knuckles scraped against sharp pink rock without tearing. Where a normal youth’s fingers would have bled down to the tendon, Pei Jing’s epidermal tissue twisted under pressure, gripped the stone. Then he propelled his seventy-kilo frame upward with cold clockwork smooth speed.
He reached a flat granite ledge twelve feet above the canyon floor.
Beneath him, obscured by the yellow leaves of the alders, lay the carcass of a mountain roe deer.
The kill was recent. The throat was torn out, blood pooling in a depression between two river stones. Two wolves were actively tearing at the deer’s flank, their snouts red to the eyes. Their tails were held low and rigid.
The third wolf—the largest, a scarred male with half its left ear torn away—stood atop a mossy boulder fifteen paces upwind. Its head was up, its yellow eyes scanning the canyon entrance, its nostrils flaring as it sampled the breeze.
The guard.
Pei Jing unslung the recurve bow.
His movements were smooth, devoid of sudden gaining speed that might trigger a hunting beast’s motion-detection vision. He drew a birch arrow from the quiver, nocked the horn groove into the beeswaxed hemp string. Then he raised the stave.
The muscles across his back—the broad back muscles and rhomboids—tightened as he drew the sixty-pound cord to the corner of his jaw.
The floating sight screen flashed a single, cold line:
At the very instant the ten percent increment settled into his neural pathways, the landscape before him shifted in clarity.
The brush, the wind currents, the subtle twitch of the guard wolf’s shoulder blades—all of it resolved into a predictable moving flight path.
Pei Jing didn’t aim for the skull. Wolf craniums were sloped plates of dense bone capable of deflecting low-poundage iron arrowheads.
He aimed for the chest cavity: three inches behind the left shoulder blade. There, the rib cage protected the lungs and main heart artery.
He released his breath halfway, held it, and relaxed the fingers of his right hand.
The bowstring sang.