Three miles north of the working-class South Ward, the narrow, crooked lanes of Coffin Alley lay buried beneath sheets of freezing autumn rain.
Decades ago, this low-lying district near the northern canal sluices had been where impoverished carpenters hammered together cheap pine coffins for plague victims. Over the years, the rotting timber workshops had sunk into the mud. Leaving behind a honeycomb of damp, underground ice-cellars where the sunlight never reached and the air smelled permanently of stagnant canal water, wet lime, and old blood.
At 7:56 PM, thirty feet beneath a shuttered coffin-maker’s shop at the dead end of the alley, twelve green tallow lamps flickered inside a underground stone vault.
The underground chamber was carved from rough black river-granite and lined with thick blocks of saltpeter ice. In the center of the room stood a heavy, rust-pitted iron operating slab bolted straight into the bedrock.
Strapped across that freezing iron slab by five thick chains of cold-forged meteoric iron was a ten-year-old boy.
Ye Xiao weighed barely fifty pounds soaking wet. His threadbare coarse-hemp tunic was torn to shreds, soaked through with rainwater and dark, crusted blood. His bare feet were blue with frostbite against the iron table.
All ten of his small knuckles were split open to the bone—the aftermath of fighting twenty armed guild thugs in the alley upstairs with nothing but a jagged. Two-foot strip of rusted barrel-iron to protect the cracked clay urn containing his dead beggar-grandfather’s ashes.
Right now, that cracked clay urn sat discarded in a corner beside a mop bucket, its gray ashes spilled across the wet flagstones.
And on the iron slab, crimson veins throbbed like red-hot iron wires beneath the pale, gaunt skin around Ye Xiao’s eyelids. Every time his small chest rose and fell in a shallow, ragged breath. Erratic sparks of razor-sharp Innate Sword Qi hissed out from the corners of his eyes and struck the iron manacles with tiny ting-ting rings.
[Target Profile: Ye Xiao (Age 10 — Orphan of Coffin Alley)]
[Destined Fate in Original Timeline: The Blood-Shadow Sword Fiend (Final Boss #3)]
[Innate Physique: Innate Sword Heart & Innate Sword Eyes (Unawakened / Overloading)]
[Current Cultivation: Rank 1 Peak (Flesh & Bone pushed to limit by starvation survival)]
[Current Darkening Meter: 91% (Critical Threshold — Deep Hatred of Aristocratic Hypocrisy)]
Beside the operating table stood a tall, skeletal man with sunken cheekbones and long, yellowed fingernails.
Chief Surgeon Cruel-Scalpel Mo—a Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmaster and head of the underground Royal Blood-Surgeon Guild—wore a spotless white silk butcher’s apron over his brocade robes. Around him stood four burly assistant surgeons in leather aprons and a trembling seventeen-year-old errand boy, Apprentice Liu, who was holding a silver tray lined with frost-jade specimen jars.
Chief Surgeon Mo picked up a curved, six-inch Frost-Silver Bone-Gouging Spoon from a pan of boiling vinegar, tested its concave edge against his thumb. Hummed a slow, nasal melody from a capital court opera.
“Hold his chin steady, Apprentice Liu,” Surgeon Mo murmured, his voice scraping like dry sandpaper over bone. “Do not let the little rat bite his own tongue before I open the orbital socket. If a single drop of resentful blood spoils the cornea, Second Prince Qian Ye will have our skins stretched over the Eastern Palace war drums.”
“Y-Yes, Chief Surgeon!” Apprentice Liu gulped, his knees knocking together as he stared down at the ten-year-old boy’s bloodshot, terrifyingly bright eyes. “B-But Master Mo...
the original order from the Eastern Palace said we were supposed to wait until midnight when the Yin-Qi peaks before extracting his Innate Sword Eyes and Innate Sword Heart.
Why did His Highness’s blood-courier gallop here in a lather an hour ago demanding we finish the butchery by eight o’clock sharp?”
Surgeon Mo let out a cold, knowing chuckle as he dipped the bone-gouging spoon into a jar of numbing corpse-oil.
“Because someone in the South Ward has been sticking their dirty fingers into His Highness’s pie for the past two days,” Surgeon Mo sneered, stepping closer to the iron operating slab. “Yesterday His Highness lost a furnace at the Royal Treasure Pavilion, and last night twelve of Shadow-Commander Crow’s men vanished without a sound. His Highness is cautious by nature.
He deduced that if Crow’s squad was captured. The midnight schedule might have leaked—so he moved our operation up by four full hours AND had me prime the Rank 3 Peak Bone-Flaying Blade Array in the ceiling.”
Surgeon Mo leaned down until his sour, betel-nut breath washed over Ye Xiao’s freezing face.
“Did you hear that, little street rat?” Surgeon Mo whispered, tapping the flat of the icy bone spoon against Ye Xiao’s bruised cheek. “Even if some meddlesome fool read Shadow-Captain Crow’s letter and decided to play hero tonight, they won’t stroll into Coffin Alley until midnight.
By then, your eyes and your beating heart will already be sitting inside Second Prince Qian Ye’s frost-jade box, and your carcass will be floating down the sewer canal toward the river.”
On the iron slab, Ye Xiao did not cry.
He hadn’t shed a single tear since the winter three years ago when his blind beggar-grandfather froze to death under the broken bridge of the East Market. Leaving seven-year-old Ye Xiao his last half-steamed bun.
During the past three days, the kindly-looking monks at the temple soup kitchen had smiled at him, patted his head. Called him a “blessed child”—only to slip paralyzing powder into his gruel and sell him to the Royal Blood-Surgeon Guild for fifty silver taels because his eyes glowed red in the dark.
When the guild guards had kicked over his grandfather’s clay urn in the alley upstairs an hour ago, Ye Xiao had fought like a cornered wolf pup. He had swung his rusted strip of barrel-iron until his fingernails tore off and his knuckles broke, slashing seven guards across the shins before Surgeon Mo broke his collarbones with a single palm strike.
“You... you’re all lying thieves,” Ye Xiao rasped, his throat raw and bleeding as he glared up through his blood-matted bangs at Surgeon Mo. “The monks smiled when they poisoned the porridge.
The nobles smiled when they kicked Grandpa’s ashes into the mud. My eyes are mine. My heart is mine!
Even if I turn into a headless ghost tonight, I’ll crawl back out of the ditch and chew through every throat in the Eastern Palace!”
ZZZZT!
A crimson spark of pure, untamed Innate Sword Qi flared from Ye Xiao’s right pupil, slicing a half-inch nick across the tip of Surgeon Mo’s nose!
Surgeon Mo hissed in pain, a tiny bead of blood welling on his skin. His sunken eyes turned venomous.
“Still baring your fangs on the chopping block?” Surgeon Mo snarled, slamming his left palm down onto Ye Xiao’s forehead to pin the boy’s skull against the iron groove. “Four assistant surgeons—hold down his shoulders and knees!
It is 7:59 PM!
I’ll scoop out this right eye first while he’s wide awake so the Sword Intent stays sharp!”
The four burly assistant surgeons lunged forward, pressing their heavy, bloodstained leather aprons down onto Ye Xiao’s skinny arms and legs.
In the corner of the ice-cellar, the tall brass pendulum clock ticked loud and slow through the suffocating silence.
Tick.
7:59:55 PM.
Tick.
7:59:57 PM.
Surgeon Mo pried open Ye Xiao’s right eyelid with two bony fingers and lowered the razor-sharp edge of the Frost-Silver Bone-Gouging Spoon until the freezing steel touched the boy’s dark eyelashes.
Ye Xiao refused to shut his eyes. Staring straight into the curved reflection of the blade as black hatred flooded his vision, the ten-year-old boy bit down on his bleeding lip and waited for the dark.
Nobody is coming, the boy thought in the freezing gloom. Grandpa is gone. In this whole filthy city, nobody cares if a beggar kid dies in the dark.
7:59:59 PM.
At the top of the stone staircase twenty feet above, heavy boots splashed once in the rainwater outside the three-inch-thick solid meteoric-iron cellar door.
A calm, unhurried voice—slightly muffled by three inches of bolted iron and stone—drifted down into the cellar:.
“Excuse me. Is this the unlicensed night clinic that forgot to ask for a parent’s signature?”
Surgeon Mo blinked, his hand pausing for half a heartbeat. “Who’s up there?! The shop is closed—!”
He never finished the sentence.
CLANG—BOOOOOOOOMMM!!
It sounded as if a ten-ton siege ram forged by a thunder god had dropped straight out of the heavens onto the top of the stairs.
The three-inch-thick, two-ton solid iron cellar door—bolted into the granite doorframe with six wrist-thick steel bars and inscribed with Rank 3 soundproofing runes—did not swing open.
It caved inward with the imprint of a single size-eleven boot stamped two inches deep into its center!
With an ear-splitting shriek of sheared steel bolts and exploding granite lintels. The entire two-ton iron door tore clean out of the masonry wall and shot down the underground staircase like a cannonball fired at point-blank range!
“W-WATCH OUT—!!”
The four burly assistant surgeons holding down Ye Xiao’s arms and legs barely had time to turn their heads. The hurtling two-ton slab of solid iron skimmed three inches above Ye Xiao’s nose—blowing his blood-matted bangs straight back with the gale-force wind—and slammed squarely into all four assistants!
WHAM—CRUNCH!!
Without a single scream, the four assistant surgeons were swept off their feet like paper dolls and plastered flat against the far granite wall behind the operating table. Pinned neatly behind the embedded iron door with only eight boots sticking out from the bottom!
Chunks of lime mortar, shattered saltpeter ice, and stone dust rained down from the shaking cellar ceiling.
In the sudden, ringing silence that followed, the brass pendulum clock in the corner chimed a single, feeble ding for 8:00 PM before its glass face cracked down the middle and fell off.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Measured, unhurried footsteps echoed down the cracked stone stairs through the swirling fog of white lime dust and cold rain.
At the bottom of the steps stood a tall, broad-shouldered man in a coarse gray cotton kitchen apron worn over a warm duck-down winter coat.
In his left hand, he held a black oiled-paper umbrella that was still dripping autumn rain onto the flagstones, tilted slightly so the water wouldn’t splash on his cuffs.
In his right hand, resting casually against his shoulder like a carpenter’s ruler, was a dark, well-used [Iron Wok Spatula] that smelled faintly of ginger, pork-bone congee, and crispy fried shallots.
Gu Changsheng lowered the umbrella an inch, looked across the cellar at the two-ton iron door wedged three inches deep into the far granite wall, and let out a mild, disappointed sigh.
“The carpenter who hung that door cheated you on the mortar,” Gu Changsheng said conversationally, shaking two drops of rainwater off his umbrella tip. “I barely tapped it with my heel to knock, and the whole frame came loose.”
Beside the operating table, Chief Surgeon Cruel-Scalpel Mo stood frozen like a wooden statue.
The Frost-Silver Bone-Gouging Spoon slipped from his numb fingers and hit the flagstones with a loud clink. His sunken eyes bulged out of their sockets as he stared from the gaping hole at the top of the stairs to the two-ton meteoric-iron door buried in the back wall.
“T-Three inches of cold-forged iron...” Surgeon Mo’s voice came out as a strangled squeak. “You...
you kicked it off the hinges from outside?!”
Two paces behind him, seventeen-year-old Apprentice Liu dropped his silver tray of specimen jars. As the frost-jade bottles shattered across the floor, a dark, warm puddle spread rapidly down the front of Apprentice Liu’s robes and pooled around his cloth shoes.
“T-THE IRON DOOR!!” Apprentice Liu shrieked at the top of his lungs, pointing a trembling finger at the eight boots twitching beneath the iron slab in the back wall. “HE KICKED THE IRON DOOR THROUGH FOUR SENIOR SURGEONS!
THE DOOR IS STUCK IN THE GRANITE WALL!!”
On the freezing iron operating table, ten-year-old Ye Xiao forgot to breathe.
Through the stinging veil of blood and sweat matted across his forehead, the boy’s wide, crimson-veined Innate Sword Eyes locked onto the tall man standing at the foot of the stairs.
Even through the blinding, needle-like chaos of his overloaded vision, the boy did not see a terrifying demon or a greedy noble in silk robes.
He saw a warm, steady golden light radiating from the man’s kitchen apron—and caught the unmistakable, mouth-watering scent of hot ginger congee and sweet honey-milk drifting through the reek of the butcher’s cellar.
[System Notification: Emergency Rescue Arrival Successful at 7:59:59 PM!]
[Target ‘Ye Xiao’ Physical Integrity: 100% Intact (Innate Sword Eyes & Sword Heart Saved!)]
[Bystander Shock Registered: Chief Surgeon Mo & Apprentice Liu Mind-Broken!]
[Daily Income Surge: +1,500,000 -> +1,650,000 DP/day!]
Gu Changsheng glanced down at his pocket watch, clicked the brass cover shut, and looked across the iron slab straight into Ye Xiao’s bloodshot eyes.
“Sorry I’m late, kid,” Gu Changsheng said warmly, tucking his umbrella under his arm. “The rain in the South Ward was heavy, and I had to make sure your younger brother and sister washed their hands before dinner. Now then—keep your eyes closed for thirty seconds while Dad cleans up the trash in this clinic.”