The alley smelled of wet wool, coal smoke, and desperate humanity.
Forty fighters stood in the ankle-deep slush beneath the dripping roof edges of the tenement. Their breath rose in ragged gray clouds. None of them wore silk or sect badges.
They were men and women of the lower city. Crippled foundry smiths with scarred hands, itinerant sword-students with ungreased sword sheaths, and elderly Qi Gathering vagrants whose frayed hemp tunics barely covered shivering collarbones.
At the front of the crowd stood Lu Feng, holding an empty bowl of barley porridge.
Lin Ke stepped through the doorway. Then, forty pairs of eyes turned toward him with the quiet, terrifying hunger of drowning men sighting a rope.
“Master Lin,” Lu Feng whispered. He stepped forward and dropping to one knee in the dirty snow. “We didn’t mean to crowd your gate. But word spread along the drainage canal before dawn. They saw my arm. They saw the Gale-Step magic charm.”
A woman stepped forward, her left shoulder locked at an unnatural sixty-degree angle, her hand clutching a cracked bronze jade slip.
“Master,” she cried, her voice cracked with despair. “I bought the Golden Script Guild’s Iron-Silk Thread Art. Two years of payments. Last month, my shoulder channel seized. The medicine room told me my core was defective. But they still want twelve spirit stones for the monthly interest. I can’t even hold my weaving shuttle. Please... Just look at my arm.”
