The bone felt freezing cold, like river ice pulled from a winter grave.
Lin Ke stared at the scroll resting on the red sandalwood counter. The slips were cut from human ribs, yellowed with age and bound together by cords of braided hair. Along each narrow rib-facet, thousands of tiny characters had been gouged into the calcium matrix using an acid metal pen.
Shopkeeper Qian wiped his sweating palms on his silk tunic, his breath coming in shallow, anxious gasps.
“Take it,” Qian urged, his voice trembling. “Two spirit stones. A single spirit stone! Just get it out from under my rafters! If Zhao Wuji’s debt collectors find demonic training fragments in my inventory, they won’t just seize my shop—they’ll hand me to the Disciplinary Hall to be fed to the spirit hounds!”
Lin Ke didn’t touch the bone right away.
He didn’t need to be a potion-maker to recognize an active dangerous payload. The faint, rotting heat wave leaking from the rib slips carried an energetic signed name that made his glassy glass spirit veins hum with static.
Don’t ingest untrusted binaries directly into the production kernel, Lin Ke thought coldly.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the grey sandbox of his mind, Lin Ke projected an isolated model of the bone scroll.
He didn’t channel his own spiritual intent into the text. Instead, he deployed a passive static check subroutine. A read-only diff designed to parse the engraved characters without executing the technique’s underlying spiritual loop.
The ancient script resolved in his visual cortex.
It was written in the ancient, angular seal-script of the Second Cleansing Era—nearly six hundred years ago. But underneath the poetic metaphors of “drinking marrow to nourish the sky river,” the raw systems stonework was clear.
Lin Ke ran the historical execution stack.
Fighter One: Qi Gathering 4. Cultivated for eighteen days. Bone thickness plummeted eighty percent. Ribs collapsed under sky chest pressure. Died of acute asphyxiation.
Fighter Fourteen: Qi Gathering 6. Cultivated for forty-one days. Spine melted into jelly-like marrow sludge. Numbed from the neck down. Perished of systemic organ black rot.
Fighter Forty-Seven: The rogue elder who had died in Qian’s guest room three nights ago. Bone minerals fully dissolved into the bloodstream, precipitating as toxic calcium stones throughout the kidneys, liver, and brain.
A total run-away memory leak, Lin Ke diagnosed.
The manual was designed to stimulate bone marrow into producing high-octane rotting Yin Qi for emergency combat bursts. To feed that surge, the manual instructed the body to cannibalize its own outer-brain bone stone matrix.
It was an infinite osteolytic loop without a garbage collector. It burned up the scaffold to power the engine until the entire building collapsed under its own weight.
Why would anyone write this? Lin Ke asked himself.
Then he parsed the metadata header.
A military suicide patch.
Forged during a siege in the Second Cleansing Era for expendable shock troops. You gave it to unsafe conscripts. They gained terrifying combat strength for thirty days, fought like demons. Then they dissolved into grey sludge before they could claim their pay.
It was lethal. It was horrifying.
And for Lin Ke, it was the single most valuable technical document he had ever laid eyes on.
Why?
Because Lin Ke didn’t have normal, healthy bones that needed preserving.
Lin Ke’s skeleton was currently choked with insoluble, hardened calcium-phosphate melted rock waste from the poisoned Iron Marrow Manual. His marrow was dying because it was trapped behind an iron-hard wall of stone-hard lime.
To save his life, he didn’t need to preserve his old bones.
He needed an osteolytic agent capable of dissolving the melted rock waste.
He just needed to throttle the engine, install a break condition, and supply a new stone feedstock before the dissolving reached total collapse.
Lin Ke cut the branch.
He slipped his hand into his sleeve, found his iron metal pen. Then he pricked the calloused pad of his left thumb.
“Branch checked: main,” he muttered.
“Well?” Shopkeeper Qian pressed, leaning over the counter with bulging eyes. “Will you take it or not?”
Lin Ke looked down at the bone scroll, his face revealing nothing.
“The manuscript is corrupted,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat. “It carries an unstable energetic cycle that causes fatal marrow collapse within forty days. It’s not an immortal art. It’s a heavy-duty execution method.”
Qian’s face fell. “Then... Then you won’t buy it?”
“I’ll take it off your hands to dispose of the dangerous spiritual waste,” Lin Ke replied smoothly. “In exchange, you’ll give me fifty low-grade spirit stones in flawless raw pebbles, three sacks of refined Red ink flux, and two jars of cold bone-glue resin. For that, you keep all one hundred and fifty pounds of Grade-2 Cold-Patterned Iron.”
Qian blinked. He looked at the gleaming pile of Cold-Patterned Iron on his counter—metal that would easily net him seventy or eighty spirit stones once resold to independent sword-smiths—and then at the cursed bone scroll that threatened his very life.
“Done!” Qian gasped, as if scared Lin Ke would change his mind. “Done, done, done!”
The old pawnbroker moved with astonishing speed.
He ducked behind the counter. He hauled out three heavy hemp sacks of bright vermilion Red ink powder, two sealed clay pot pots of bone-glue resin, and a heavy velvet pouch containing fifty raw spirit stones.
Lin Ke picked up the bone scroll.
The moment his skin touched the rib slips, a cold, greasy shock lanced through his fingers. That made the hairline fracture in his left forearm throb with a vicious, nauseating ache.
He didn’t flinch. He wrapped the scroll tightly in three layers of oiled canvas, bound it with copper wire. Then he packed it into the bottom of his satchel beneath the red stone sacks.
“Meng Shan,” Lin Ke called through the beaded curtain. “Haul the leftover iron in.”
Five minutes later, the transaction was complete.
The cart was empty of metal, the two barrels of sludge left in the market reclamation ditch. The satchel over Lin Ke’s shoulder was heavy with the raw materials of survival.
They left Cloud Mist Market under the cover of the gathering twilight. They took the winding quarry road back to the Seventh Smelting Ward. The rain had ceased, replaced by a dense, freezing mountain mist that clung to the pine needles and slick dark rock boulders.
Meng Shan walked beside him, his eyes constantly scanning the ridgeline for Zhao Wuji’s scouts.
“Brother Lin,” Meng Shan rumbled in a low voice. “What was that scroll? When you picked it up, my earth channels flared like cold iron touching ice.”
“An ancient manual,” Lin Ke said, his eyes fixed on the dark path ahead. “A unsafe fragment.”
“Demonic?” Meng Shan asked, his jaw tightening.
“Code,” Lin Ke replied. “Dangerous, unthrottled, poorly written code. But it contains the only subroutine capable of stripping the poison from my marrow.”
Meng Shan fell silent. He didn’t understand the words, but he understood the cold determination in Lin Ke’s voice. A man who had lived his entire life under the crushing weight of quarry rocks knew when someone was preparing to pry open a tomb.
They reached the Seventh Ward after the second night bell had tolled.
The smelting compound was dark and quiet, save for the dull, rhythmic clanking of the night pumps in the drainage trenches. Lin Ke parted ways with Meng Shan at the tool shed, instructing him to sleep and keep his ears open for Zhao Ba’s movements.
Lin Ke slipped into his private quarters. A small, drafty stone lean-to built against the outer wall of Fire Cellar Four.
He barred the heavy oak door with an iron bolt.
He lit a single animal fat lamp, setting it on his rough-hewn pine workbench.
He placed the fifty spirit stones, the three sacks of red stone, and the jar of Apothecary He’s bone broth in neat, orderly rows.
Then, he drew the copper-bound package from his satchel.
He cut the wire. He unrolled the oiled canvas.
The ancient bone slips spilled across the wooden planks under the flickering yellow candlelight.
The moment the ribs touched the air, the surrounding spiritual intent in the room curdled.
A sickly, pale grey mist began to seep from the carved slips, swirling in tiny vortexes across the desktop.
Lin Ke sat on the bench. He laid his arms flat against the wood.
Without warning, the hairline fracture in his left radius erupted into white-hot agony.
The hardened melted rock waste trapped inside his bone began to vibrate in sympathy with the bone slips. It hummed with a deep, sickening hum that made his teeth clatter against his jaw.
Beneath his skin, along the length of his forearm, tiny pores dilated. And a thin, greasy ooze of grey, stone-hard settled mud began to cry through the flesh, staining his linen sleeve with the stench of ancient tomb lime.
Lin Ke clutched his left arm, his breath hissing through his clenched teeth.
The manual wasn’t waiting for him to cultivate it.
The poison in his body was already answering the call.