The iron chisel in Lin Ke’s right hand was cold and heavy.
He held it between his teeth, biting down on the flat steel until his back teeth throbbed. He couldn’t afford to scream. The underground chimney pipes of Cellar Four carried sound upward into the office barracks. If Elder Wu heard shrieking in the dead of night, he would summon the night watch.
Before him on the workbench lay his reagents:
A shallow baked-clay bowl containing half an ounce of super-soaked Red ink-Iron colloid. Fine spirit iron specks suspended in red stone extract and bitter pine resin. A strip of boiled spirit-silk. And an eight-inch iron needle.
Lin Ke wrapped the spirit-silk tightly around the base of his left index finger, knotting it twice with his teeth and his right hand until the skin turned purple from restricted blood flow.
A quarantine firewall, he thought. If the osteolytic process runs away, the silk tourniquet and an energetic reverse-flow Qi block will isolate the rotting marrow to the finger. That kept the cascade from reaching my hand or forearm.
He closed his eyes to compile the isolated deployment.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the grey mental space, Lin Ke mapped the exact boundary conditions.
The middle finger bone was about one and a half inches long. It was structurally choked with the same hardened lime that plagued his entire skeleton, brittle as dried coral.
In the sandbox, the energetic block held. The rotting dissolving was restricted strictly between the proximal and distal finger joints.
The pulse cycle ran cleanly.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He opened his physical eyes. The real world rushed back—the smell of sulfur, the cold stone under his knees, the taste of iron on his teeth.
There was no more time for simulations.
Deploy to production.
Tianfu. Merge.
The merge hit like a white-hot coal jammed into the center of his knuckle.
Lin Ke’s jaw clenched with terrifying violence against the iron chisel. Blood burst from his gums, pooling hot and metal in his mouth, but he didn’t make a sound.
His eyes bugged out, tears of pure agony blurring his vision as the split-second osteolytic pulse engaged.
Sizzle.
Inside the middle finger bone of his left index finger, the hardened melted rock waste didn’t merely dissolve—it boiled.
The sound inside his head was like acid poured onto dry chalk. The stone-hard lime deposits that had poisoned his marrow for months were stripped from the connective tissue scaffold in violent, micro-second bursts.
Rest cycle: forty-eight split seconds.
Lin Ke forced his trembling right hand forward. He dipped the tip of the iron needle into the Red ink-Iron colloid and drove the needle directly beneath the nail bed of his index finger, piercing the bone-skin.
“Ngh!” he choked behind the iron chisel.
He channeled his Qi. That forced the colloidal mid-air through the needle directly into the porous, cleaned out bone.
Pulse.
The osteoclasts melted the next tiny layer of melted rock waste.
Rest.
The iron-red stone chelate flooded into the empty pores, the liquid silver-sulfur bonds stabilizing the iron atoms as they locked into the living connective tissue fibrils.
A thick, grey, foul-smelling paste began to cry from the puncture wound and around the edges of the nail bed. The expelled hardened waste scum, forced out by the dense incoming metal lattice.
Lin Ke’s finger swelled, turning purple, then angry black, and finally an unnatural, matte slate-grey.
The pain was not the sharp, clean bite of a blade. It was a choking, deep, crushing agony that seemed to drill into the marrow and twist the nerves into knots. His body shook with violent tremors, sweat pouring off his brow and sizzling against the cold stone floor.
Maintain the cycle, his mind screamed through the white-out of pain. Twelve active. Forty-eight rest. Don’t drop the clock rate!
Ten cycles.
Fifty cycles.
Two hundred cycles.
For four painful minutes, the tiny refinery inside his left finger pulsed.
Then, the final pulse completed.
The burning heat subsided with shocking speed, replaced by a sudden, icy numbness.
Lin Ke spat the iron chisel onto the bench. It clattered against the stone, smeared with bright red blood from his chewed gums.
He slumped against the anvil, his chest heaving, his breath coming in ragged, shallow wheezes.
He lifted his left hand with his right.
His index finger looked alien.
The skin over the middle finger bone was tight, pale. Then he marked with a faint, metal sheen beneath the outer skin. The grey paste had dried into a chalky crust around the nail. It he wiped away with a trembling rag.
When he touched the bone through the skin, it didn’t feel like warm human tissue.
It was freezing cold. It felt heavy—noticeably heavier than the next-door fingers, as though an iron bar had been threaded into his knuckle.
Lin Ke took a slow breath. He reached for a two-pound cross-peen forging hammer resting on the anvil.
He laid his left hand flat on the stone anvil face, spreading his fingers.
He raised the hammer in his right hand.
A real-world load test.
He brought the hammer down directly onto the middle finger bone of his left index finger.
CLANG!
A sharp, ringing tone echoed through the underground cellar. The steel hammer bounced off the bone with a violent recoil that jarred Lin Ke’s right wrist.
The finger didn’t break.
The skin bruised slightly, turning a faint red. But beneath the flesh, the Ashen Iron Lattice absorbed the blunt blasting blast wave fully. There was no bone pain. No hairline fracture. No shaking deep ring.
It was like striking an anvil resting upon another anvil.
Lin Ke stared at his finger in the flickering lamp light.
It works, he thought, a savage, hungry spark igniting in his chest. The pulsed chelation works in meatspace. High pulling strength, zero turning to stone, extreme shaking damping.
He bent the finger to close his fist.
Crack.
A sickening, jagged spike of pain shot through his first knuckle and into his palm.
Lin Ke gasped, freezing the movement instantly.
A bright red warning prompt flashed across his eyes, flashing with angry urgency:
Lin Ke looked down at his hand, his brow furrowing into deep ridges.
The middle finger bone was nearly iron-hard. But the untreated base bone behind it was still weak, brittle, and chalky.
The two connected bones had vastly different densities and stiffness. Because of that, any torque applied to the joint focused the entire clockwork load onto the weaker bone’s screen.
A sound and clockwork flow pushback mismatch, Lin Ke realized with chilling clarity.
You can’t weld high-pulling tool steel directly to brittle baked-clay without a shift slope. If he threw a punch with this hand, the Ashen Iron finger wouldn’t break. It would rip the entire brittle knuckle right out of his palm.
Lin Ke leaned back against the anvil. He held his rigid, slate-grey finger in the dim light.
A nearby upgrade was impossible.
He couldn’t do this limb by limb. He couldn’t patch his body in clip-on pieces.
The skeleton was an interconnected load-bearing stonework.
If he wanted to survive Chai Gang’s heavy club and the crushing pressure of the sect, he had to execute a full-body core commit.
Every bone. Every rib. His spine. His skull.
All at once, or not at all.
Before he could begin mapping the terrifying scope of that operation, heavy, wild footsteps echoed through the outer drainage chimney pipes.
Someone was banging furiously on the outer heavy blast door of Furnace Cellar Four.
“Lin Ke!” a desperate voice cried through the iron hatch. “Lin Ke, open the latch! It’s Shen Yue! They’ve poisoned the magic charm ink!”