The midnight air in the Ancestral Stele Pavilion was cold enough to freeze water in the basins.
Lin Ke moved like a shadow between the towering granite pillars. His grey clerk robes were tucked tight against his hips to prevent the coarse linen from rustling against stone. His right hand, still bound in Apothecary He’s stiff willow-bark compress, rested flat against the small of his back.
The pavilion was deserted.
Located at the boundary between the Seventh Ward and the Outer Sect Central Plaza, the open-air hall housed thirty-six massive black steles. Massive stone slabs of polished black glass, twelve feet high, carved with the foundational scriptures of the Azure Cloud Sect.
In the center of the hall, bathed in the pale, icy light of the waning moon, stood Stele Four.
It bore the title: Foundational Smelting Method: The Iron Marrow Manual.
* * *
Lin Ke stepped onto the raised dais, his breath fogging in the freezing stillness.
Every outer laborer, fire slave, and unranked miner forced into the Seventh Ward was needed to kowtow before this monument on their first day of servant contract. They were instructed to press their foreheads to the black glass base, memorize the sixty-four lines of verse, and circulate their Qi according to the carved diagrams.
Those sixty-four lines were what had killed eight hundred and forty-seven men in the mortality rolls over the past three years alone.
Lin Ke lifted his unbandaged left hand.
With his consolidation of Qi Gathering Stage 1, the Tian Fu engine had compiled a new tool into his mental work belt. A careful check work that Colin Shaw had used thousands of times to track down regressions in legacy enterprise codebases.
Lin Ke pressed his palm flat against the cold, polished face of the black glass stele.
Execute.
The physical world dissolved behind a veil of falling monochrome characters.
The cold black glass under his fingertips seemed to turn semi-clear, shedding hundreds of years of dust, lacquer, and superficial chippings. In Lin Ke’s mind, the sixty-four engraved lines of scripture separated into three distinct, chronological strata. Each line tagged with a ghostly timestamp, an energetic hash, and an author signed name.
Lines 1 through 41 were ancient.
The original scripture was clean, elegant, and balanced. It was a standard, high-smooth speed marrow-refining method designed to draw surrounding metal Qi down to the bone surface, strengthening the bones against clockwork trauma without contaminating the hematopoietic core.
Then Lin Ke’s gaze dropped to Line 42.
The characters for Line 42 glowed a clashing, sickly yellow in his mind, jarringly out of rhythm with the ancient verse above it.
Lin Ke zoomed into the diff of Line 42.
The original order directed the circulating metal Qi to bypass the lower-back bones, venting stone dirt through the lower Changqiang acupoint into the ground.
Elder Zhao Tingfeng had modified that exact line 312 years ago.
The modified text instructed the fighter to lock the Changqiang gate. That forced the raw metal Qi to cycle repeatedly through the spongy marrow of the lower-back spine and pelvic basin.
The result of that single modification was horrifyingly elegant.
By forcing raw melted rock waste Qi into the spongy marrow, the laborer experienced a first, rapid surge in physical strength. Allowing a starved teenager to haul four hundred pounds of coal within two weeks of arrival.
But the dirt could never vent. Because of that, the stone ions precipitated out of the bloodstream, forming permanent calcium-stone-glass crystal-forming inside the bones.
Within three years, the laborer became fully hardened.
Their bones turned into brittle stone, their joints locked, their blood stone-hard. Their heart ceased beating from stone toxicity.
A deliberate hardware backdoor, Lin Ke realized. His blood ran cold as he traced the spidery revision history. Engineered three hundred years ago by the Zhao Clan.
It wasn’t an ancient flaw or a misunderstanding of anatomy.
It was an intentional, calculated stone-built backdoor. It produced a docile, scared workforce that worked with superhuman strength for three years. Then conveniently dropped dead into the melted rock waste pits before they could ever gather enough Qi to reach Foundation Establishment or demand their freedom.
A self-purging slave class. Kept by a single line of malicious code carved into black stone.
Lin Ke pulled his hand back from the stele as though the black glass were coated in venom.
His jaw clenched until his teeth clicked in the silent pavilion. Seventeen years of disaster recovery had made him cynical about human incompetence. But this went beyond fault.
This was institutional slaughter disguised as a sacred training heritage.
He pulled the iron metal pen from his sash, jammed the needle point into his left thumb. Then he let the sharp pain anchor his racing thoughts.
“Branch checked,” he whispered through cold lips. “Main.”
The sect wasn’t broken. The sect was running exactly as its master builders intended.
“Admiring the old family scriptures in the dark, little clerk?”
A soft, sneering voice echoed from behind the fluted granite pillars to the east.
Lin Ke didn’t flinch. He slowly pivoted on his heels. That kept his hands loosely at his sides, his grey clerk robes draping over the bloody metal pen.
Stepping out from the deep shadows of the pillar was a slender, middle-aged fighter clad in spotless dark green silk stitched with silver copper-coin motifs. He held a small, rotating jade sphere between his pale fingers, tossing it with easy rhythm.
Qi Gathering Stage 4.
The man’s eyes were narrow, cold, and hungry, bearing the clear arrogance of a senior estate manager who treated human lives like line items on a profit-and-loss sheet.
“Or are you looking for something you shouldn’t see?” the man purred, stepping onto the moonlit dais.