The sorghum gruel was lukewarm, grey, and tasted like boiled ditch water.
A single salted radish slice floated on the surface of the wooden bowl. The morning’s bonus for delivering five hundred and eighty pounds of grade-three spirit iron.
Lin Ke sat on an overturned melted rock waste trough in the rear courtyard, cradling the bowl with his left hand.
His right forearm burned with a dull, throbbing heat. The blistered skin beneath the linen wrap was hot to the touch, weeping sticky lymph through the fibers.
Every time his heart beat, a phantom sting radiated from the thumb he had pricked at midnight.
Energy intake: negligible, he calculated, swallowing the watery starch. Two hundred calories. Barely enough to offset basal body-energy loss, let alone body repair on forty square inches of third-degree burns.
At the ward gate, Elder Wu’s green silk carriage was already departing.
The audit had taken less than ten minutes. The senior elder hadn’t even stepped down onto the muddy flat stone slabs. He had merely peered through the carriage blinds at the neatly stacked feather-pattern metal bars, affixed his red jade seal to the monthly manifest. Then he muttered a single sentence to Overseer Fang:
“Continue this yield. My retirement pension depends on the Seventh Ward’s quota.”
Fang had bowed until his nose touched the dirt.
And the carriage wheels rattled out of earshot. Then, Fang had turned back to the slaves, his copper whip cracking against the stable fence.
“Ten-minute break finished! Shift two to the melted rock waste dump! We have sixty carts of fire tailings to sort before noon!”
* * *
The melted rock waste dump behind the smelting ward was an artificial mountain twenty stories tall.
For three hundred years, the Azure Cloud Sect had dumped the waste of thirty-two heavy-duty blast furnaces into this ravine. It was a chaotic deep-rock graveyard of black glass-fused glass, porous sulfur clinker, cracked graphite crucibles, and scorched heat-proof bricks.
The air here was cooler than the fire hall, but it smelled of old poison. Stale arsenic, rusted hematite, and cold soot.
Lin Ke dragged a three-pronged iron rake through the ash.
His task was simple. Sort the dense iron-bearing chunks from the sterile rock, tossing the heavy ore into a wicker basket strapped to his hip.
His hardened knee joints creaked with every step. The Iron Marrow Manual was quiet in his thoughts, its background process suspended. But the forty percent stone buildup already in his skeleton remained an inert, leaden anchor.
I can’t survive another three weeks as a mortal slave, Lin Ke noted calmly. He pulled another chunk of melted rock waste from the grey dust. Even if I dodge Fang’s whip and prevent fire blowouts, this meat will freeze. Just then, the winter frost hits.
He needed a training manual.
An traditional manual was out of the question. The sect’s standard entry scriptures—the Cloud-Drifting Breath or the Nine-River Tide—relied on expansive, slow analog Qi dilation.
Putting an analog flood through his non-elastic glass spirit veins would be like hooking an ungrounded lightning rod to a Christmas tree bulb.
He needed something extreme.
Something fast, high-pressure, and discrete. Something that operated in tight, high-hum pulses rather than nonstop waves.
His rake struck something hard with a sharp, hollow tink.
Lin Ke paused.
The sound was not the dull thud of dark rock or the metal ring of pig iron. It was the glassy clink of crystal-hardened jade.
He glanced toward the overseer’s watching platform seventy paces up the slope. Overseer Fang was sitting on an oak stool under an oilcloth awning, his boots propped on a barrel, snoring softly with a clay jug of rice wine resting against his belly.
Lin Ke dropped to his knees in the ash, using his broad shoulders to screen the ground from view.
With his left hand, he pushed aside a crust of crumbly green copper melted rock waste.
Buried twelve inches deep in the soot lay a broken fragment of a potion-made crucible, shattered by high-heat shock. Inside the hollow curve of the shard was a scorched, blood-soaked scrap of heavy crimson silk, charred black along three edges.
Inner students often dumped the wreckage of their failed personal experiments into the Seventh Ward’s fire chimney pipes, using the heavy-duty fires to destroy evidence of forbidden arts or taken away contraband.
Lin Ke touched the silk.
A faint, prickly heat buzzed against his calloused fingertips. It felt like holding a copper wire connected to a leaking battery.
Lin Ke didn’t hesitate.
He feigned a violent coughing fit. That let his chest heave as he pitched forward onto his elbows, burying his face in the soot.
While his upper body convulsed, his left hand slipped the charred silk scrap out of the crucible fragment. Then it slid it cleanly up the wide hemp sleeve of his tunic, wedging it against the tight linen bandage on his burned forearm.
The rough silk pressed against the weeping burn. It sent a jolt of fire through his nerves, but he didn’t twitch.
He spat a mouthful of black thick spit into the dirt, pushed himself up with his iron rake, and continued dragging ore into his basket.
* * *
The latrine ditch at the southern edge of the melted rock waste yard was a narrow trench dug into shale. It was surrounded by waist-high walls of rotting wattling.
The stench of ammonia and stale ditch water was choking. It made it the only place in the Seventh Smelting Ward where an overseer would never set foot.
Lin Ke crouched at the end of the ditch, his back pressed against the shale wall.
He listened for thirty seconds.
Only the distant thrum of the bellows and the cry of black crows circling the melted rock waste peaks broke the silence.
He reached into his sleeve and pulled out the crimson silk.
The scrap was barely six inches square. The edges were blackened and crumbly. But the central script, written in red stone ink mixed with crushed fire-ruby, remained sharp and blazing bright.
Lin Ke smoothed the silk across his knee.
The title across the top banner was written in ancient, aggressive calligraphy:
Nine-Fold Overclocked Crimson Spirit vein (Jiu-Zhuan Chi-Yang Jing)
Beneath the title sat a block of introductory commentary, penned in a wild, spidery hand that looked like it had been scratched into the silk with a trembling needle:
> “A foundation forged in madness. It draws raw Yang fire from the Sanjiao spirit vein directly into the heart-vessel in discrete, high-pressure packets, multiplying breath flow speed ninefold. > > Four hundred and twelve outer students tried this path over six ages. > > Four hundred and ten suffered total heat runaway within twelve breaths, their blood boiling into steam, their bones combusting into white ash. > > The scripture is hereby unsafe as a suicidal demonic strange flaw. Consign to the smelting flames.”
Lin Ke stared at the spidery ink for a long, quiet moment.
Four hundred and twelve practitioners.
Four hundred and ten fatalities. Two survivors who likely went mad or ended up crippled.
A historical failure rate of 99.51%.
To a traditional fighter, it was a terrifying curse. A demonic manual that devoured souls and burned men alive from the inside out. Elders would spit upon the ground at the mere mention of its name, warning their students that pride and reckless ambition led straight to a pile of greasy cinder.
To Colin Shaw, it was something else entirely.
It was documented.
“Four hundred and ten combustions,” Lin Ke whispered into the foul air of the latrine ditch, his soot-streaked lips curling into the faintest, coldest smile. “Good. At least somebody ran the unit tests and recorded the failure modes.”
He spread the silk flat against his thigh, pulling his four-inch iron metal pen from his belt.
Beneath the spidery warning lay the actual blood-flow diagram—a stylized human figure rendered in gold-leaf foil, overlaid with nineteen jagged scarlet lines that bypassed the dantian entirely.
Normal scriptures routed Qi like an irrigation canal. Wide, lazy, meandering loops that pooled in the belly to nourish the organs.
This thing was a bare high-voltage signal line.
It drew raw Yang heat essence directly from external heat sources—like a blast fire hearth—and funneled it straight into the Sanjiao triple-burner channel. It didn’t store the energy in the dantian. It whipped the packets through the heart-vessel at nine times normal speed, using the water-flow friction to crack the marrow and ignite internal fire.
The fatal bug was right away obvious to anyone who had ever designed a power spreading grid.
There is no ground return, Lin Ke analyzed, his thumb lightly tracing the scarlet line where it ended suddenly at the base of the skull. And there is no heat blow-off valve. The moment the Sanjiao channel heats up, its internal pushback drops. The lower the pushback, the faster the current flows, which generates more heat in an exponential positive feedback loop.
The four hundred and ten students hadn’t been cursed by an angry god.
They had suffered an unhandled runaway heat runaway loop. Their flesh had simply melted when the circuit reached critical amperage.
Traditional elastic spirit veins would bloat and burst within five seconds of this load, Lin Ke reasoned. He felt the cold, rigid thrum of his own glassy glass channels beneath his collarbone. My glass channels don’t dilate. They have zero stretch, but near-instant signal speed.
A brittle glass waveguide that couldn’t handle analog floods, paired with a volatile, high-hum pulsed fire manual that killed anyone with fleshy, dilating veins.
It was a nightmare match.
Or, if properly patched and cooled, the only stonework on this entire continent that could keep him alive past nineteen days.
He touched the scarred pad of his thumb with the iron metal pen, anchoring himself.
“Branch target got: crimson-v01.”
Lin Ke folded the charred silk scrap into a tight, two-inch square, tucked it deep into the hem of his breeches. Then he picked up his wooden sorting rake.
Night was coming.
And in the silence of the bunkhouse, he had eighty phantom funerals to attend.