The grey sludge weeping from Lin Ke’s forearms smelled like stale pond water and crushed limestone.
It wasn’t blood. It was stone ooze. The stone-hard calcium-phosphate waste scum from the poisoned Iron Marrow Manual, melted by the sympathetic deep ring of the bone scroll and forced outward through the skin sweat pores.
Every pulse of his heart felt like a hammer striking an exposed nerve inside his outward shaft.
His bones were burning with an unnatural, freezing fever. An icy fire that seemed to chew at the bone-skin from the inside out.
Lin Ke didn’t panic. He braced both elbows against the pine desk, digging his heels into the dirt floor of the lean-to. His breathing remained strictly rhythmic: four seconds in through the nose, four seconds held, four seconds out through pursed lips.
Panic is an unhandled exception, he told himself coldly. Diagnose the fault. Isolate the crash vector.
He closed his eyes.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the grey sandbox of his mind, Lin Ke stripped away his flesh and blood.
Before him floated his complete skeletal model. The bones were not the smooth, pearl-white ivory of a healthy Qi Gathering fighter. They were mottled with dark, porous veins of dead grey melted rock waste. Insoluble calcifications that had choked the Haversian canals and starved the marrow of breath flow.
Lin Ke loaded the ancient bone scroll’s working routine into the test model.
In the mental model, the spiritual intent took hold.
The marrow cavities in his femurs, humeri, and ribs began to churn. Instead of producing red blood and pure spiritual essence, the hyper-activated osteoclasts began to devour the surrounding outer-brain bone.
The sensation in the test model was horrific.
It was the feeling of millions of tiny iron ants chewing through living calcium scaffolds.
At hour twelve in the test model, the hardened melted rock waste was fully dissolved. For a brief moment, the simulated marrow breathed. Channeling an astonishing surge of dense, rotting Yin Qi that doubled his spiritual output.
Then the disaster struck.
The manual had no termination condition. Because of that, the osteoclasts didn’t stop at the melted rock waste.
They turned on the healthy outer-brain bone.
At hour twenty-four, the outer walls of his femurs thinned to the thickness of eggshells.
At hour thirty-six, the simulated Lin Ke took a single step forward. Both of his shins crumpled into white powder beneath his body weight.
At hour forty, his ribs caved in against his lungs, puncturing the lung lining. The simulated marrow melted entirely into grey, putrid broth.
A jolt of phantom agony tore through Lin Ke’s nervous system, wildly snapping him back into meatspace.
He gasped, nearly falling off the wooden stool.
His chest hitched, lungs burning as if real bone fragments were pressing into his alveoli. His heart galloped at one hundred and sixty beats per minute.
Phantom Death Syndrome, he logged, his teeth chattering from the lingering mental shock. The brain can’t distinguish between simulated dissolving and physical reality.
He reached into his sleeve with trembling fingers, drew his iron metal pen. Then he drove the blunt steel needle deep into the fleshy pad of his left thumb.
Pain.
Real, sharp, nearby, living pain.
A fat drop of bright crimson blood welled on the skin.
“Branch checked: main,” Lin Ke rasped into the empty room. “Head state: active. Meatspace intact.”
He sat in the dark for three minutes until his pulse steadied.
Then, he picked up his drafting brush.
Now I see the stonework, he wrote in his ledger, using dense systems shorthand that looked like meaningless shape to any fighter who might peer over his shoulder.
The ancient creator of the Deep-sea Bone-Melting Chant was not a complete fool. The technique was an emergency energy extraction subroutine. It was designed to burn the ship’s timbers to keep the boiler running during a storm.
The deepest bug was load-bearing:
The technique dissolved bone to create rotting power. But it provided zero gearwork to rebuild what it destroyed.
To turn this fatal curse into an immortal art, Lin Ke didn’t need to reject the manual.
He needed to refactor it.
First: Pulsed Duty Cycle.
Never let the osteolytic process run continuously. Instead of a forty-hour uninterrupted melt, run it in micro-bursts. Twelve split seconds of dissolving to strip the hardened melted rock waste, followed right away by forty-eight split seconds of rest.
Second: Mineral Chelation Buffer.
During the forty-eight split second rest cycle, the hungry, cleaned out bone matrix would be starved of calcium. Left to itself, it would collapse.
So feed it something better than calcium.
Feed it a super-soaked colloidal mid-air of high-purity spirit iron filings, red stone flux, and marrow-soothing alkaloids.
Iron atoms, steadied by liquid silver-sulfur chelation bonds from the red stone, would slip into the porous hydroxyapatite lattice left behind by the dissolved melted rock waste.
The rebuilding bone wouldn’t reform as brittle, living calcium.
It would crystallize into an Ashen Iron Lattice—an interstitial metal-biopolymer composite.
Dense as tool steel. Tough as cured oak.
Impervious to blunt-force fractures. And dense enough to act as a grounded load-bearing mount for his brittle glass spirit veins.
Lin Ke tapped his brush against the inkstone.
It will be excruciating, he calculated coldly. The real body can’t roll back. If the chelation rate lags behind the dissolving rate by even ten percent, the bone will turn to mush in meatspace.
Before he could finish the exact proof, a heavy, stumbling thud struck the outer blast door of the lean-to.
Lin Ke froze. He swept the bone slips, the red stone sacks, and his ledger beneath a pile of dirty fire aprons in two fluid motions.
He drew a heavy iron crowbar from behind the door and slid the bolt back.
The door swung inward.
Meng Shan collapsed across the threshold, his massive frame hitting the dirt floor with a jarring crash.
“Meng Shan!” Lin Ke hissed, dropping to one knee.
The giant quarryman was gasping for air, blood foaming at the corners of his mouth.
His canvas tunic was shredded across the left ribs. He showed a massive, purplish-black deep bruise the size of a dinner plate. Beneath the bruised skin, the seventh and eighth ribs sat at an unnatural, sunken angle.
“Brother... Lin...” Meng Shan choked out, his fingers digging into the dirt. “The... The upper quarry road.”
“Quiet. Conserve oxygen,” Lin Ke commanded, his fingers already pressing into Meng Shan’s main neck blood vessel to check pulse pressure.
“Chai Gang...” Meng Shan rasped, a streak of blood dribbling down his chin. “Zhao Wuji’s chief guard... He brought four men with iron cudgels. Ambushed the night shift. Put a five-stone toll on every cart of tailings.”
Meng Shan clenched his bloody fists, tears of humiliation burning in his eyes.
“Two young apprentices... They tried to run. Chai Gang swung his four-foot heavy club... Would have crushed their skulls. I... I threw myself between them. Took the blow across the ribs.”
Lin Ke gently pressed his palm against Meng Shan’s shattered flank.
Beneath the flesh, the broad, distributed earth channels he had refactored for Meng Shan were humming furiously. The distributed network had absorbed eighty percent of the moving megapascal blast wave, venting it downward through his torso into the ground.
If Meng Shan had possessed standard, traditional spirit veins, that heavy club strike would have driven broken bone fragments straight through his heart.
He was alive. But his ribs were fractured, and his earth channels were straining under severe high-pressure shock.
“He told me to bring you a message,” Meng Shan whispered, his vision blurring with tiredness. “Said if the Seventh Ward doesn’t pay fifty spirit stones in back-taxes by noon tomorrow... He’ll come down to Cellar Four and break your other arm.”
Lin Ke sat back on his heels in the dark room.
He looked down at his own bandaged left forearm, where the hairline fracture still throbbed with cold fire.
Then he looked at the bloody deep bruise across Meng Shan’s chest.
Outside, the cold mountain wind howled through the chimney pipe pipes of Furnace Cellar Four, sounding like the laughter of distant wolves.
Lin Ke’s expression didn’t change. His pulse didn’t spike.
His eyes were cold, still, and pitch-black. The eyes of an engineer who had just watched a rogue process deliberately corrupt production data.
“He wants fifty stones,” Lin Ke said softly.
He stood up, walked over to the workbench, and retrieved Apothecary He’s bone-setting salve.
“Lie still, Meng Shan,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat as an iron plate. “I’m going to set your ribs. And tomorrow, we stop patching the fire.”
He looked at the dark outline of the bone scroll hidden beneath the aprons.
“Tomorrow, we refactor the skeleton.”