The cold iron scroll felt like a slab of river ice against Lin Ke’s palms.
Its weight was unnatural for its dimensions. Less than three feet in length, yet it dragged down his wrists with the mass of fifty pounds of solid pig iron. The metal was an alloy he had never met in the Seventh Ward. Dark, mirror-polished star-iron shot through with tiny threads of rainbow-bright bismuth that shifted from violet to oily green under the animal fat lamps.
Across the header, the machine-etched Precursor ideograms seemed to pulse with faint, dormant intelligence:
PRECURSOR MATRIX: HUNDRED-THREAD ASYNCHRONOUS Ringing BUS (百脉奔流真诀)
Apothecary He leaned over Lin Ke’s shoulder, squinting through his quartz glasses. The cynical old healer sucked in a sharp, ragged breath between yellowed teeth. His hand shook as he reached out to stop Lin Ke from unrolling the scroll further.
“Put that away, boy,” He whispered, his voice stripped of its usual sarcasm. “I know that script. Every country physician over sixty knows that script.”
“It’s a working specification,” Lin Ke replied, his fingers tracing the cold metal foil.
“It’s a headsman’s writ,” the apothecary hissed. “Six hundred and eighteen fighters tried that manual during the Second Dynasty. Six hundred and fourteen suffered total bodily liquefaction. Their bones turned to red grease in front of their sect masters. The four who survived lived as drooling vegetables with their nervous systems burned to gray ash. The Imperial Ministry of Works banned it under Grade Four Contraband Edict 09.”
