The release was clean.
The three-ply hemp string snapped against the leather wrist guard on Pei Jing’s left forearm with a dry slap. The sixty-pound ash bow snapped forward, imparting forty-two blasts of heat of striking force to the birch arrow shaft.
At fifteen paces, transit time was under two-tenths of a second.
The iron broadhead struck the guard wolf three inches behind the left shoulder blade, slipping between the fifth and sixth ribs. There was no dramatic screech. The impact drove the wolf sideways off its mossy boulder with a muffled grunt, its paws scrambling wildly against wet granite.
The broadhead had punched holes in both pleural cavities, collapsing the negative chest pressure that kept the lungs inflated. Pink, aerated foam bubbled instantly from the beast’s nostrils.
The guard was dead. Its nervous system simply had not yet completed the math.
The leftover two wolves reacted in two hundred split seconds.
They didn’t flee. Hungry pack hierarchy was hardwired for immediate counter-violence when feeding grounds were breached. The larger of the two—a heavy, broad-chested male weighing at least forty pounds—spun toward the granite ledge. He tracked the sound of the shaking bowstring. The third wolf, a leaner, scarred female, flanked instantly to the left, darting through the scrub alders to cut off the descent path.
Pei Jing didn’t try to reload the recurve bow.
At twelve feet of height and fifteen paces of separation, an adult grey wolf covered the distance in 1.4 seconds. Stringing a second birch arrow, anchoring, and aiming needed 2.8 seconds.
Attempting to shoot a second arrow was a working failure.
He dropped the bow onto the flat shelf. His right hand dropped to his hemp belt. He closed around the rough wooden grip of the eight-inch pig-iron mountain chopper. His left hand drew the antler-handled skinning knife from his boot.
The heavy male reached the base of the ledge and leaped.
It was an explosive upright lunge, propelled by massive thigh muscles and calcaneal tendons. The wolf’s jaws opened wide. It exposed four yellow canine teeth capable of exerting four hundred pounds of crushing pressure per square inch.
Pei Jing didn’t lean back. Leaning back surrendered the balance point.
Instead, he stepped forward into the fall. He dropped his weight off the twelve-foot ledge directly toward the climbing hunting beast.
Gravity added sixty-eight pounds of falling human mass to the equation.
In mid-air, Pei Jing rotated his hips forty-five degrees to clear the snapping jaws. The wolf’s teeth snapped shut three inches from his ribs with the sound crack of dry timber breaking.
Pei Jing brought the heavy spine of the pig-iron mountain chopper down across the base of the wolf’s skull.
THWACK.
The pig-iron edge didn’t cut—the edge was too thick—but the blunt shock passed cleanly through the neck bones. The wolf’s head was driven downward into the granite floor of the canyon. The animal hit the rocks with a sodden crunch, its rear legs kicking out in violent, reflex decerebrate spasms.
Pei Jing landed on the balls of his feet, his knees flexing to absorb the impact.
His boots slid six inches across the wet pine needles, then locked.
The female wolf was already in motion.
She emerged from the alder thicket low to the ground, moving at five meters per second. She didn’t jump for the throat. She drove her snout toward Pei Jing’s right knee, aiming to sever the knee tendon and anchor him to the soil.
Pei Jing evaluated her attack vector in one-tenth of a second.
Vector: low-angle flight path. Mass: thirty-four pounds. Target: lateral collateral joint cord of the right knee.
He didn’t dodge. On slick pine needles, lateral footwork carried a forty percent probability of slipping.
He pivoted on the heel of his left foot. He swung his right leg back to present the heavy outer edge of his calf. At the same moment, he dropped his left knee directly into the wolf’s path. He lowered his balance point below hers.
The wolf’s jaws clamped onto the lower hem of his trousers, tearing the coarse linen.
Before her teeth could penetrate to the bone-skin, Pei Jing’s left hand struck.
The antler-handled skinning knife, sharpened on the Black Mountain Whetstone to an eighteen-degree edge, drove downward behind the wolf’s right collarbone into the chest inlet.
The five-inch carbon-steel blade cut the subclavian artery and pierced the apex of the right lung.
Pei Jing held the handle with both hands, twisting the blade ninety degrees to prevent the wound from sealing around the flat of the metal.
The wolf let out a strangled cough. A violent convulsion rippled down her spine as systemic blood pressure dropped to zero. Her jaws unclasped from his trouser leg. Her weight went slack against his shin.
Pei Jing held his position for ten seconds, counting the pulses of blood against his knuckles.
One. Two. Three.
Then stillness.
He withdrew the knife, wiping the crimson blade across the wolf’s flank.
Behind him, the heavy male was still clawing at the pine needles, its forelegs numbed by the bone-shaking trauma to its neck spine, its jaws snapping blindly at empty air.
Pei Jing walked over. He didn’t speak. He stepped firmly onto the wolf’s muzzle with his right heel, pinning its jaw to the stone. Then he drove the point of the skinning knife into the skull-base gap at the base of the skull, severing the lower brain from the main spine nerve.
The kicking stopped instantly.
Across the canyon, the guard wolf lay beside its mossy boulder, motionless.
Pei Jing stood in the silent box canyon. The smell of copper, hot intestine, and wet fur rose into the frosty mountain air. It mixed with the bitter scent of bruised alders.
He stood still for sixty seconds, regulating his breathing. Four seconds in through the nose, four seconds out through pursed lips. His heart rate, which had peaked at one hundred and forty beats during the drop, slowed down steadily to seventy-two.
His floating sight screen activated without sound:
Pei Jing studied the record.
“Two engagements logged. Two skills compounded by ten percent.”
He knelt beside the three carcasses and began the harvest. In hunting beast country, the scent of fresh blood traveled downwind rapidly. Within forty minutes, mountain leopards or higher-tier carnivores from the deep peaks would arrive to investigate the kill.
He worked with clean, steady care.
First, the roe deer. The deer’s rear quarters had been partially eaten by the wolves. But the loins, liver, and front shoulders remained untouched—roughly thirty-five pounds of lean venison.
Then, the wolves.
Pei Jing made a shallow clean cut from the throat to the anus of the large male. He avoided puncturing the belly wall to keep stomach bacteria from contaminating the meat. He peeled the skin back with his left hand. Meanwhile, the razor edge of the skinning knife sliced the connective muscle tissue with light, whispering strokes.
The pelt came off in one nonstop piece, thick with dense, winter under-wool.
He repeated the process with the female and the guard. Three intact wolf pelts. In Cloudford Town’s eastern bazaar, mountain wolf pelts in early winter sold for six to eight hundred copper cash apiece if free of large tears. The arrow wound in the guard’s ribs and the single knife punctures in the other two left the hides in near-flawless commercial condition.
Next, the muscle tissue and bone marrow.
Pei Jing carved the backstraps, the heavy hindquarters. The shoulder roasts from all three carcasses, stacking the dark, stringy meat onto the cleaned pelts. He cracked the ribcages and pulled out the livers and hearts. Dense sources of iron, stored energy, and fat-soluble vitamins.
Finally, he used the heavy pig-iron chopper to sever the long thigh bone and upper arm bone bones at the joints, packing them into his hemp sack.
Bone marrow was the ultimate heat-powered prize. Ninety percent pure rich fat, rich in monounsaturated fats, calcium, and connective tissue.
Total yield calculated: Clean meat: about one hundred and ten pounds. Bone marrow and soup bones: twenty-five pounds. Usable pelts: three units. Edible venison salvage: twenty-five pounds.
Total gross weight: one hundred and sixty pounds.
For a half-starved sixteen-year-old youth. It hauled one hundred and sixty pounds of wet meat and bone down six li of steep, icy mountain crags would have torn the lower-back joint cords and destroyed the knees.
Pei Jing tested his stance.
He bound the pelts around the meat bundles using stripped willow bark, then secured the heavy hemp sack across his shoulders with double ropes, distributing the load across his upper back muscle and broad back muscles.
He stood up.
The weight pressed down on his vertebral column with familiar clockwork power. But his newly conditioned Tier 1 skeletal structure didn’t buckle. The thick, calloused knuckles tightened around the straps. The healed collar bone held rigid. The gluteal muscles engaged, locking his pelvis into a stable power cradle.
“Load capacity checked,” he said quietly.
He picked up grandfather’s ash recurve bow, retrieved the spent arrow from the guard’s carcass, wiped the broadhead clean on moss. Then he turned his boots back toward the Cloudford trail.
The deficit had been answered.