The smell of sour lime and coagulating blood filled the sick room shed.
It wasn’t an actual hospital. It was an unheated lean-to built against the outer retaining wall of the Seventh Ward, where broken slaves were dumped onto wet straw mats to expire quietly before the morning corpse cart arrived.
In the corner, sprawled across two moldy pallets pushed together, lay Meng Shan.
His chest rose and fell in shallow, hitched gasps that rattled like loose gravel shaken in a tin can. The skin across his throat and collarbones had turned a dark, bruised slate-gray, veined with purplish-black knots where stale Qi was pooling against dead tissue.
Two ward laborers were standing near the door, holding hemp ropes and an iron-tipped gaff hook.
“Leave the gaff on the bench,” Lin Ke said, stepping through the sagging doorway.
The laborers turned, scowling. But their eyes caught the grey linen robes and the copper medallion dangling from Lin Ke’s sash. They paused, their fingers slipping from the wooden handles.
“Clerk Lin,” the older laborer grunted, wiping sweat from his brow. “Supervisor Chen told us to clear the shed before shift change. This one’s lungs are flooded with melted rock waste blood. He won’t see midnight. We were going to haul him to the pit behind Kiln Six.”
“His asset paperwork hasn’t been reconciled,” Lin Ke said, his tone dry and emotionless as he produced a blank office manifest from his sleeve. “Form 12-C: Laborer Asset Mortality Audit needs seventy-two hours of watching before corpse disposal. If you move him before the audit period expires, Disciplinary Hall docks your monthly grain ration by half a peck.”
The two men exchanged scared glances.
To an illiterate laborer, a clerk with a brush and an official form was far more dangerous than an overseer with a whip. Overseers only broke bones. Clerks could erase your family’s rice share with a flick of horsehair.
“We... We’ll come back tomorrow, Clerk Lin,” the older one mumbled, dropping the ropes and backing out into the sleet.
The door clattered shut.
* * *
Lin Ke walked over to the straw pallets and knelt beside the dying titan.
Meng Shan’s eyes were half-open, clouded with a milky, feverish film. His lips were cracked and smeared with dried black crust. Every breath sounded like it was tearing through raw meat.
“Don’t move,” Lin Ke instructed softly.
He reached into his sleeve. He pulled out five long, raw iron acupuncture needles he had scavenged from the scrap bins and filed sharp on the archive floorstones.
He didn’t touch the needles to Meng Shan yet.
Instead, Lin Ke placed the fingertips of his uninjured left hand flat against Meng Shan’s chest bone.
A semi-clear stone-built blueprint swelled across the back of Lin Ke’s eyes.
In a traditional fighter, the spirit veins were like flexible copper pipes: slender, elastic. It carried a smooth, single-channel stream of fluid energy.
Meng Shan was nothing like that.
The sect elders had diagnosed him as “rock-veined”—a derogatory term for laborers born with defective, hardened channels that couldn’t circulate traditional Azure Cloud scriptures. They believed his veins were clogged with inert earth settled mud.
The diff told a fully different story.
His veins aren’t clogged, Lin Ke observed with cold, razor-sharp clarity. They’re massive.
Meng Shan didn’t have narrow pipes choked with dirt. He possessed a congenital tri-channel parallel bus. Three massive, wide-bore channels running alongside his spine, built with extraordinarily high natural material flow pushback.
The Azure Cloud Sect’s forced training manuals were designed for single-stream, low-flow pushback pathways. Meng Shan tried to force a standard single-stream Qi flow through his body. Then, the huge natural pushback of his channels acted like a magnetic-pull choke.
The energy couldn’t push through. It bounced back.
Every breath he took under the sect manual was slamming a high-pressure energetic blast wave into his own heart and lungs, causing micro-tiny blood vessel ruptures and forcing heavy minerals out of his bones into his bloodstream.
He wasn’t dying of rock-veined defects.
He was dying because the sect was trying to run single-threaded low-voltage software on a heavy-duty three-phase power bus.
“A system stonework mismatch,” Lin Ke murmured. “Simple enough to patch.”
Lin Ke picked up the first iron needle.
He rolled Meng Shan onto his side, exposing the massive, soot-stained expanse of the giant’s spine. The skin was boiling hot to the touch, shaking with the choked, trapped energy beneath.
“This will hurt,” Lin Ke said quietly. “Don’t fight the change in current.”
Lin Ke drove the first needle straight into the T-3 upper-back bones, angling the tip thirty degrees lateral toward the left shoulder blade.
Meng Shan’s entire body arched in a violent, reflex burst. His teeth clicked together, but no scream emerged from his throat—only a harsh, whistling gasp.
Lin Ke didn’t hesitate. His fingers moved with the ruthless care of a technician inserting jumper cables into an overloaded server rack.
Needle two: T-5 spine bones, forty-five degrees medial. Needle three: T-8 spine bones, grounding to the left lower-back node. Needle four and five: Twin lateral shunt gates at the base of the sacrum.
With five iron needles driven into the bone, Lin Ke created a physical hardware bypass.
The single, choked Qi stream rushing down Meng Shan’s spine hit the first needle and was forcibly sharded into three distinct, parallel sub-circuits.
The magnetic-pull choke collapsed instantly.
The massive energetic backing-up pressure that had been crushing Meng Shan’s lungs found three wide, clear channels to flow through. The high-flow pushback, which had earlier caused heat and tissue damage, suddenly functioned as designed: absorbing moving shock and dampening the high-hum shaking into steady, grounding warmth.
A sound like rushing water echoed deep within Meng Shan’s chest.
The dark, purplish knots along his collarbones softened, fading back to a healthy, weathered bronze. The rattle in his lungs died away, replaced by the deep, rhythmic rise and fall of clear, clear breathing.
His core heat steadied.
Lin Ke withdrew the five iron needles one by one, wiping the dark, metal fluid from the tips onto a scrap of rag.
He pulled a wooden bowl of clean well-water from his satchel, set it on the floor beside the pallet, and laid two clean strips of willow-bark healing wrap next to it.
“Drink the water,” Lin Ke said. He rose to his feet and smoothing down his grey clerk robes. “Change the healing wraps on your back before sunrise. If you lift another ore cart with a single-stream breath, you’ll undo the shunt and drown in your own blood.”
He turned toward the door of the shed, his boots crunching over the straw.
Behind him, a massive, calloused hand shifted against the floorboards.
Meng Shan slowly, agonizingly, pushed himself up from the straw pallet.
The giant sat with his legs crossed, staring down at his huge, stone-like palms. The crushing weight that had suffocated his chest for five years—the constant, painful pressure that every elder had told him was his own cursed blood—was fully gone.
His breathing was easy. His veins felt cool, calm, and solid as mountain granite.
Meng Shan lifted his head, his dark, heavy eyes fixing on the thin boy standing in the doorway.
The giant’s jaw worked for several seconds before a deep, rumbling voice broke the silence of the shed. A voice that sounded like grinding millstones:
“...You stopped the weight inside my chest.”
Meng Shan looked down at his unbandaged hands, then back to Lin Ke’s deadpan, unflinching eyes.
“How?”