The smell of bitter pine-resin and crushed bone-soothing resin filled the cramped lean-to.
Lin Ke worked in silence, his fingers pressing into the swollen flesh of Meng Shan’s ribs. Every time his thumbs applied pressure to realign the cracked costal margins, the giant quarryman groaned through clenched teeth, his thick knuckles white against the edge of the cot.
“Steady,” Lin Ke murmured. “The seventh rib has an oblique fissure. The eighth has a greenstick squeezing. If you breathe too deep before the resin cures, the bone will set unevenly and impinge on your left between-rib nerve.”
“Chai Gang... Didn’t even use a technique,” Meng Shan gritted out, sweat stinging his bruised eyes. “Just pure physical weight and a four-foot iron heavy club. Qi Gathering 4. The brute swung it with one arm like he was swatting a fly.”
Lin Ke smoothed a thick layer of Apothecary He’s grey salve over the purple deep bruise.
He didn’t need to be told about Chai Gang’s power. Chai Gang was a guard bred for violence. It was thick bones, heavy joints. A blunt moving style that bypassed energy shields by sending devastating megapascal blast waves through flesh and bone.
How would my body hold up against that heavy club? Lin Ke asked himself.
He didn’t speculate. He opened a sandbox.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the grey test model space, Lin Ke stepped onto the quarry road.
Chai Gang materialized before him. Six feet four inches of corded muscle. He swung an eighty-pound fluted iron heavy club with casual, brutal driving force.
Lin Ke tested Branch 01: Dodge and counter with a Nine-Fold Crimson heat strike.
In test model, Lin Ke sidestepped. He dodged the main mass of the iron head. But the tip of the heavy club grazed his left shoulder.
Crack.
Even a glancing blow sent over twelve hundred blasts of heat of striking force. Lin Ke’s left collar bone shattered instantly. The bone fragments pierced his subclavian artery.
Branch 04: Block with an iron crowbar using a two-handed ward.
The iron crowbar met the iron heavy club in mid-air. The crowbar held.
Lin Ke’s forearms didn’t.
The blasting blast wave traveled through the iron crowbar, entered his palms. Then it hit his hardened outward and ulnar bones. His brittle glass spirit veins and chalk-filled marrow couldn’t damp the shaking. Both forearms exploded into compound fractures from the inside out.
Lin Ke ran eight more combat branches.
He tried retreating. He tried throwing blinding red stone dust. He tried venting flash-heat to melt the heavy club shaft.
In twelve out of twelve simulations, the conclusion was matching:
Whenever Chai Gang’s blunt weapon established physical contact—even indirectly through parries or glancing hits—Lin Ke’s skeletal stonework suffered total, disabling failure.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He slipped his hand into his robe, retrieved his iron metal pen. Then he drove it into the pad of his left thumb.
“Branch checked: main,” he whispered.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead.
A mortal engineer dealing with brittle materials didn’t try to make them softer. He heavy them, anchored them, or replaced them with composites capable of high-hum energy fading away.
He looked at Meng Shan, whose breathing was beginning to even out under the numbing herbs.
“Meng Shan,” Lin Ke said. “Your earth channels absorbed eighty percent of that strike, but your grounding route was linear. You tried to dump the shock down your spine into your left heel.”
“That’s how my grandfather taught me,” Meng Shan grunted. “Drive the mountain into the stone.”
“A single channel creates a bottleneck,” Lin Ke said. He reached down with two acupuncture needles from his satchel. “When the moving load exceeds channel throughput, the pressure backs up into the nearest load-bearing joint—your ribs. We need to refactor your grounding into a distributed three-sided bus.”
Lin Ke placed the needles into Meng Shan’s lower back, flanking the lower-back bones at the Daju and Guanyuan acupoints.
“Channel your Earth Qi now,” Lin Ke instructed. “Don’t push it straight down. Split the current at your pelvis: one-third down the left leg, one-third down the right leg, and one-third recirculating through your broad back muscles to damp the chest recoil.”
Meng Shan closed his eyes.
He drew in a deep breath of Earth Qi from the flat stone slabs below.
Beneath his skin, the broad, dull yellow channels flickered. Under Lin Ke’s guidance, the single thick stream branched into three parallel pathways. He formed a balanced equilateral circuit between his shoulders and his heels.
A deep, ringing hum shook in Meng Shan’s chest. The dull ache in his fractured ribs visibly lessened as the leftover shear tension drained away into the floor.
Meng Shan’s eyes flew open, filled with shock.
“The pressure...” Meng Shan whispered, rolling his shoulders with minimal discomfort. “The weight is gone. It feels like the stone beneath the cellar is carrying my ribs.”
“Parallel spreading,” Lin Ke said, pulling the needles free. “Load-balancing prevents single-point overloads. But you still can’t fight for forty-eight hours. The bone fissures need time for the resin to mineralize.”
“And Chai Gang?” Meng Shan asked, his brow furrowing with dark worry. “He gave us until noon tomorrow. If we don’t bring the fifty stones, he’ll march into the ward with his men.”
“He won’t find anyone to fight,” Lin Ke said coldly. “We’re shutting down all operations for forty-eight hours.”
“Shut down?” Meng Shan sat up, wincing slightly. “Elder Wu will lose his mind! He’ll think we’ve surrendered!”
“Let him think whatever he wants,” Lin Ke said. “Tell Elder Wu that the toxic fumes from Crucible Four have contaminated the lower draft halls. Call it a forced safety decontamination pause. Tell him if he enters, his lungs will rot before his pension matures.”
Lin Ke stood up.
He gathered the three sacks of refined Red ink flux, the jars of bone resin, his vials of spring water, and the copper-bound rib scroll.
He walked to the heavy blast door that separated the lean-to from the deepest underground chamber of Fire Cellar Four. The abandoned crucible pit where the heat of the central magma vents seeped through the dark rock bedrock.
“Where are you going, Brother Lin?” Meng Shan asked, watching Lin Ke’s retreating back.
Lin Ke paused at the heavy iron doorway.
The air beyond was dry, scorching, and smelled of fiery sulfur and ancient ash.
“I have a critical system upgrade to compile,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat and unbending. “Lock this door from the outside, Meng Shan. Bar it with the heavy timber beam. Don’t open it for anyone—not for Elder Wu, not for Chai Gang, not even if you hear bone splintering on the other side.”
“Brother Lin...” Meng Shan’s voice was laced with dread. “What are you going to do?”
Lin Ke stepped across the threshold into the oppressive heat of the cellar.
“I’m going to replace my skeleton,” Lin Ke said.
He pulled the heavy iron door shut.
The iron latch dropped into place with a hollow, echoing clang.
Inside the underground dark, Lin Ke slid the internal deadbolts.
The choice was twin. Refactor the bone matrix now, or let Chai Gang’s heavy club turn his ribs into powder tomorrow.
Lin Ke lit an oil lamp, set his tools on the cold stone anvil. Then he took a deep breath of the fiery air.
The countdown had begun.