Oilskin crackled between Kaelen’s fingers as he unfolded the ancestral booklet.
The pages were yellowed and smelled of rancid tallow and old cedar. Bound in double-stitched calfskin, the slim volume had been sewn inside the patriarch’s scabbard lining like holy scripture.
Kaelen leaned his hip against the scorched worktable and flipped past the dedication.
Old Barnaby stood three feet away beside the scorched hearth, leaning heavily on his ironwood poker. His single working eye remained glued to the oilskin pages resting in Kaelen’s palm.
“You cannot read that now, lad,” Barnaby rasped, coughing against the lingering smoke. “Derrick guarded those stances for thirty years. They require twenty years of foundation just to keep from tearing your tendons.”
Kaelen turned to the first diagram without answering.
Twenty years of foundation sounds like a terrible way to spend an afternoon, Kaelen thought. Especially when five minutes on my clock buys more than a thousand hours of quiet study.
The Fallow Slate flared behind his eyes with calm silver light.
[Fallow Comprehension Engaged: Vance Clan Blade Manual] [Current Multiplier: 241x Active] [Target: Ancestral Blade Forms (Tier 1)] [Equivalent Rate: 1 Minute = 241 Hours]
Kaelen let his gaze trace the ink strokes across the rough hemp paper.
The first form was called Pine in the Blizzard. It was a defensive ward meant to turn aside heavy iron poles. In the margins, seven generations of Vance patriarchs had scribbled notes about hip torque and foot pressure.
Under the cold light of the slate, the ink strokes broke apart into clean lines of force.
One minute passed.
To Old Barnaby, Kaelen was merely turning pages with lazy indifference. Inside Kaelen’s mind, two hundred and forty-one hours of relentless practice unfolded like a rushing river, exposing every flaw in the wrist angle and where the third patriarch had overcompensated for a bad knee.
By the second minute, the booklet’s midsection fell open.
The River-Severing Sweep flashed across his awareness. Four hundred and eighty-two hours of simulated edge alignment carved through his muscle memory. The stiff forms stopped feeling like borrowed clan tradition and settled into his marrow.
Barnaby shifted his grip on his iron ladle as another heavy blow shook the front parlor wall.
“Derrick spent thirty winters sweating over those middle pages,” Barnaby muttered, squinting at the dense ink diagrams. “He always claimed the blade Qi burned his leg meridians.”
“His meridians burned because his footwork leaked power at the heel,” Kaelen murmured softly.
He did not look up from the page.
Three minutes passed on the internal dial.
The equivalent of seven hundred and twenty-three hours settled into his shoulders. The wooden rafters overhead rattled as another iron battering ram struck the manor’s courtyard gates. Dust showered down between the hanging dried herbs.
Sera Thorne stood by the interior doorframe, her spear angled toward the hallway. Her knuckles were white against the polished ash shaft.
“The outer barricade just split,” Sera said. Her voice remained crisp and even. “Ten seconds until they breach the inner yard.”
“Take eight seconds to breathe,” Kaelen said, flicking to the final page. “I have two diagrams left.”
Barnaby Holt let out a rough bark from the hearth corner. The old alchemist had a butcher knife tucked into his belt and his iron ladle raised like a cudgel.
“Let the lad read, girl,” Barnaby grunted. “When he gets that glassy look in his eyes, even the gods should stay out of his way.”
The fourth minute clicked away into the ether. Nine hundred and sixty-four hours of blade work flooded Kaelen’s awareness.
The final form was the Frost-Pine Horizon. It was the technique Derrick had tried and failed to master for twenty years. The manual claimed it could split a river boat in half, but the original author had left the transition between the lungs and the shoulder blade incomplete.
Kaelen filled the gap with a simple shift of weight.
At the fifth minute, the silver slate chimed against his skull like a clear bell.
[Fallow Comprehension Concluded: 5 Minutes Expended] [Equivalent Training Time: 1,205 Hours] [Vance Clan Blade: Transcendent Dao Intent Achieved (400% Strike Force)] [Burst Window Remaining: 49 Minutes]
The oilskin manual slipped shut with a soft slap.
Kaelen tucked the booklet into his robe beside the porcelain vials holding his eight remaining Tier 2 Spirit-Forging Supreme Pills. Barnaby stared at the boy’s calm face, his jaw slack.
“You just read two hundred years of Vance heritage in the time it takes to steep green tea,” Barnaby whispered, his voice completely hollow.
“The writer used too many adjectives,” Kaelen replied.
He turned toward the iron rack beside the kitchen door.
Three weapons hung from the pegs. Two were notched hunting cleavers, but the center peg held a five-foot spirit-iron broadsword. Its edge was dull gray, flecked with spots of dried rust along the fuller.
Kaelen lifted the heavy weapon with one hand.
The balance was awful. The hilt was wrapped in cheap pigskin, and the counterweight was two ounces too light for the thick blade.
First Brother probably spent eighty silver taels on this iron scrap, Kaelen thought. If I die today, I am coming back as a hungry ghost to audit his expense ledgers.
He gave the broadsword a light flick.
The air in the kitchen hissed. A razor-thin ripple of invisible force cut through the steam, slicing cleanly through a hanging bundle of dried sage four yards away. The herbs dropped into a neat pile on the floorboards.
Barnaby’s breath caught in his throat. His mouth opened, but no words came out.
“Watch the kitchen door,” Kaelen told the old herb keeper, stepping out of the smoke-filled kitchen toward the front porch. “Mina is resting inside, and she does not need more soot on her blankets.”
Just as Kaelen reached the porch steps, the inner courtyard barricade blew inward with a deafening roar of splintering oak.
Iron axes hacked through the last crossbars as smoke billowed across the flagstones. Behind the smoke came Baron Derrick Vance and Magistrate Vane-Locke’s twenty surviving elite Blood-Wolf raiders, storming into the inner courtyard with feral howls.
Each raider carried a heavy, serrated sabre coated in black tallow. Their eyes were bloodshot and wide, driven mad by the promise of Vance gold while Derrick pointed frantically toward the shed porch.
At the center of the courtyard, Magistrate Vane-Locke stood beside the stone fountain.
The magistrate looked immaculate despite the battle. His high-collared magistrate robe bore silver clouds along the sleeves, and his dark eyes swept over the bloodied flagstones with cold disdain.
“Burn the rear sheds first,” Vane-Locke commanded smoothly. “Leave no one alive to testify to the prefecture.”
The leading raiders saw Kaelen standing alone in the kitchen doorway.
A hulking man with a jagged scar across his throat barked a guttural laugh. “Look at this one! A soft little master with a rusty pig-sticker!”
The raiders surged forward in a tight wedge. Twenty sabres rose in unison, catching the reddish glare of the courtyard fires. They were veterans of the northern border, trained to butcher defensive lines with overwhelming weight.
Kaelen took a single step forward into the courtyard.
He did not shout. He did not channel visible light or summon dramatic gusts of wind.
He simply shifted his weight from his left heel to the ball of his right foot, invoking Transcendent Ash-Wind Footwork.
The world seemed to drop into cold clarity.
Kaelen blurred.
To the charging bandits, the boy on the porch simply vanished. A puff of white kitchen steam spun where he had been standing half a heartbeat before.
Then the autumn wind arrived.
Kaelen moved through the center of their formation like smoke passing between tree trunks. He did not hack. He did not stab.
His spirit-iron broadsword drew a single, continuous crescent through the crimson haze.
It was the Frost-Pine Horizon, stripped of all theatrical flourishes and magnified fourfold by Transcendent Dao Intent. The four-hundred-percent force multiplier did not manifest as a crude explosion. It focused the blade’s leading edge into a line thinner than spider silk.
The sweep lasted exactly five seconds.
A continuous, metallic chime rang out like a hammer striking twenty anvils at once.
The broadsword never touched flesh. Its flat struck weapon guards and its point tapped cross-hilts. Its edge sheared through rivet pins with microscopic precision.
Kaelen completed his circle and came to a gentle halt five yards behind the charging line.
His broadsword rested loosely at his side, its tip pointed toward the cobblestones. His breathing remained slow, completely unstirred by the motion.
For two heartbeats, the raiders kept running forward on pure momentum.
Then their hands came apart from their weapons.
Twenty serrated sabres snapped clean at the hilt. Blades spun through the air like thrown coins, burying themselves deep into the stone walls, the wooden porch pillars, and the well-beam overhead.
Twenty hilts slipped from twenty pairs of numb, bloody fingers.
The raiders skidded to a halt. They looked down at their empty, trembling hands, their minds unable to process the transition from hunters to prey. Every tendon in their forearms burned as if struck by lightning.
Not a single bandit was killed.
Every single one was completely, utterly disarmed.
A heavy silence descended over the smoke-choked courtyard, broken only by the crackle of burning roof timbers.
Near the breached courtyard archway, Baron Derrick Vance staggered back against a cracked granite pillar. His hands gripped the rough stone so hard his fingernails split, his face entirely drained of color.
“The ancestral arc,” Derrick muttered, tears of shock leaking down his soot-stained cheeks. “He used the flat to redirect twenty blades simultaneously. That is not mortal swordplay—that is Transcendent Dao Intent.”
In the kitchen doorway, Barnaby lowered his wooden ladle. The old man began to chuckle, a low, rasping sound that rattled in his throat.
“Told you,” Barnaby wheezed. “The boy is too lazy to swing twice. If he can finish a fight in one stroke, he will invent a whole new martial realm just to save his shoulder.”
Sera Thorne stepped onto the porch behind Barnaby. Her gray eyes swept across the twenty trembling bandits, then fixed on Kaelen’s back. She quickly noted the snapped blades and intact bones, her calculating mind assessing the sheer efficiency of the strike.
“Zero casualties to clean up,” Sera noted under her breath. “That saves forty silver taels in gravedigging fees.”
Across the courtyard, Magistrate Vane-Locke’s serene expression finally cracked.
His aristocratic eyebrows twitched. His hands, previously tucked inside his wide silk sleeves, emerged slowly. His knuckles were pale.
“What manner of trick was that?” Vane-Locke said, his voice dropping to a harsh rasp. “A third-rank mortal scrap using an illusion talisman?”
Kaelen did not answer the magistrate.
Instead, he reached into the breast of his hemp robe with his left hand. He withdrew two small porcelain vials, tossing them backward over his shoulder without looking.
“Sera,” Kaelen called out casually.
Sera caught the first vial out of the air with practiced ease. Barnaby snatched the second with his good hand, his eyes widening as the sweet aroma of Tier 2 spirit medicine seeped through the wax seals.
“Two Tier 2 Spirit-Forging Supreme Pills,” Kaelen said, his voice carrying clearly across the quiet yard as six Tier 2 Supreme Pills and four hundred and fifty Low-Grade Spirit Stones remained in his reserve. “One for each of you. Seal the perimeter and make sure none of these sheep wander into the herb garden.”
Barnaby looked at the glowing pill inside the vial, his jaw dropping. “Lad, these are worth a fortune!”
“Take it and stop talking,” Kaelen said. “The steam is getting into my tea leaves, and I have forty-eight minutes left on my two-hundred-and-forty-one-times window.”
Every minute I spend standing in this soot is another minute subtracted from my bedroll, Kaelen thought with deep annoyance. And this magistrate is wearing silk that probably costs more than my entire herb shed.
Kaelen turned his full attention toward Magistrate Vane-Locke.
The twenty disarmed raiders scrambled backward like frightened crabs, crawling over one another to escape toward the outer perimeter. Neither Kaelen nor Vane-Locke spared them a glance.
Kaelen walked slowly across the courtyard, his cloth slippers making soft scuffing noises on the gravel.
He dragged the heavy broadsword loosely behind him, its tip carving a shallow line through the ash.
“You took your time arriving, Magistrate,” Kaelen said, his tone mild and conversational. “Did your carriage break an axle, or were you waiting for the heat to finish melting my stew-pot?”
Vane-Locke’s face hardened into a mask of pure venom.
“Arrogant dog,” the magistrate hissed. “Do you think disarming a few mortal mercenaries puts you on equal footing with an imperial official?”
The magistrate raised both arms.
A deep, metallic grinding sound echoed from within Vane-Locke’s silk sleeves. Dark, liquid-like spirit iron surged from hidden bracers along his forearms, flowing outward like ink until it encased both hands and elbows in segmented black armor.
The air around him suddenly grew heavy and cold.
This chill carried the suffocating weight of an Iron Bone cultivator’s physical domain. A faint, oily black sheen wrapped around his armored fists, smelling of sulfur and refined lead.
“You are nothing more than a Mortal Pulse ant,” Vane-Locke said, his lips curling back over yellowed teeth. “You have never felt the weight of true Iron Bone Qi. Your cheap steel cannot even scratch my skin!”
The magistrate stepped forward, his boots crushing the stone flagstones into fine powder.
He swung his right arm in a violent, horizontal arc.
A crescent of pitch-black Qi erupted from his iron-clad fingers. The crescent expanded instantly into a fifteen-meter wave of pressurized iron force, screaming through the courtyard air like a shrieking gale.
The blast tore up rows of cobblestones, hurling pulverized rock and splintered timber into the sky.
It flew straight for Kaelen’s throat, carrying the full, merciless weight of an Iron Bone expert determined to grind a mortal ant into paste.