Hour forty-two arrived with a dull, sickening slip in Lin Ke’s lower back.
It felt as though five stacked fine china cups had just slid sideways on an oiled platter.
Lin Ke was sitting on a low wooden bench. But the osteolytic wave reached his third lower-back vertebra. Then, his torso buckled forward at an unnatural, twisted angle.
A sharp, electric shock screamed through his sciatic nerve, freezing both legs in place.
Lin Ke gasped, his forehead hitting the edge of the stone workbench.
He couldn’t straighten his back.
In meatspace, the body was not an idealized exact wireframe. For thirty-eight years on Earth, Colin Shaw had hunched over dual monitors in ergonomic chairs that weren’t ergonomic at all, developing a mild chest kyphosis and a minor leftward lower-back tilt.
Then he had arrived in this world, spending months hauling seventy-pound coal baskets across the uneven cobblestones of the Seventh Ward, bracing the strap entirely against his right shoulder.
His physical spine was uneven. It was crooked.
And now, with the hardened melted rock waste dissolved by the pulsed chant, the cleaned out, softened spine bones were slipping out of their natural grooves under the sheer weight of his upper torso!
If the Ashen Iron Lattice crystal-hardened. Meanwhile, the spine was crooked, the metal matrix would lock the misalignment permanently in place.
He would be a hunched, crippled invalid for the rest of his training life.
A merge conflict, his mind screamed through the blinding pain.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the mental sandbox, the alarm flashed in jagged scarlet banners:
He couldn’t resolve this from the inside.
He couldn’t pull his own spine straight using muscle power. The muscles were in violent, spastic contraction trying to protect the unstable main spine nerve.
Any violent internal Qi surge would only shear the facet joints and sever the central dural sac.
I need external clockwork traction, Lin Ke realized with chilling clarity. Calibrated axial tension to pull the column into sharp-angled neutral before the chelation freezes the lattice.
He couldn’t do it alone.
Lin Ke forced his raspy, smoke-scorched voice into the copper speaking pipe that pierced the inner blast door.
“Meng Shan...” he choked out. “Apothecary He... Enter. Now.”
Outside the blast door, heavy bolts scraped instantly.
Meng Shan had not left the threshold for two straight days. Beside him, Apothecary He had arrived six hours ago, hovering nervously near the watching slit with jars of cooling salve.
The heavy iron door swung open with a screech.
Both men stepped into the vault, wearing thick linen respirators soaked in vinegar to filter the lingering sulfur fumes.
The sight before them made even Meng Shan’s breath hitch.
Lin Ke was slumped over the workbench, naked to the waist. His back was arched at a jagged, unnatural angle, the skin over his spine glowing with a dull, radioactive violet-red fever.
Beneath the flesh, the knobby ridges of his spine bones were twitching, shifting sideways like trapped beetles.
“Ancestors above...” Apothecary He whispered, clutching his wooden medicine chest. “His spine is slipping. The spinal marrow is going to shear!”
“Don’t... Panic,” Lin Ke rasped, his eyes bloodshot, his teeth clenched against the bench wood. “Meng Shan. Traction. Ankle harness.”
Meng Shan dropped his heavy hammer, stepping forward with total focus. “Tell me what to do, Brother Lin.”
“Take the leather lifting straps from the crane,” Lin Ke ordered, each syllable a battle against painful spasms. “Loop them around both of my ankles. Anchor your boots against the fire anvil. Pull.”
Meng Shan paused, eyes wide. “Pull? Brother Lin, if I pull too hard, I’ll dislocate your hips!”
“Exactly one hundred and twenty pounds of pulling load,” Lin Ke commanded with terrifying care. “Not eighty. Not one hundred and fifty. One hundred and twenty. Apothecaries He... Take the neck cradle. Support the base of my skull. Apply thirty pounds of counter-traction upward.”
Apothecary He didn’t argue. The old healer saw the cold and exact disaster unfolding.
He unrolled a carved cedar neck brace, slipping it beneath Lin Ke’s chin and back of the skull, bracing his own knees against the stone workbench.
“Ready, He?” Meng Shan rumbled, wrapping the greased leather straps twice around his massive forearms.
“Pull, you giant fool!” He barked.
Meng Shan leaned back into his Distributed Earth-Core Stance.
His wide earth channels flared with a dull yellow hum. He locked his boots to the flat stone slabs like tree roots. He hauled on the leather straps with steady, clockwork force.
TENSION.
The axial load seized Lin Ke’s body.
His feet pulled downward. Apothecary He held his skull firm against the bench.
CRACK-CRACK.
A series of sharp, air-powered pops echoed along Lin Ke’s back as the tightly packed, slipping spine bones were forced apart by the traction.
The lateral shifted weight snapped back into the central upright axis.
The nerve impingement vanished in an instant. The blinding electric pain in his legs cleared, replaced by a pure, clean, sharp-angled stretch along the anterior lengthwise joint cord.
“Hold that load!” Lin Ke gasped, blood dripping from his nose. “Hold it steady for three minutes!”
Now. Execute manual conflict resolution.
Tianfu. Commit.
Lin Ke channeled the fourth bowl of Red ink-Iron slurry. It he had kept warm near the fire bowl.
He didn’t drink it. He channeled the spiritual essence directly from his dantian. There, the dense stone Qi had been stored.
Pulse.
The final hardened melted rock waste along the vertebral bodies dissolved away into nothingness.
Rest.
The iron-red stone chelate flooded into the swelled intervertebral spaces and the spongiosa of the vertebral bodies.
Layer by tiny layer, the spine didn’t just rebuild—it transformed.
The thirty-three spine bones crystal-hardened into linked, slate-grey shock absorbers.
The facet joints, the transverse processes, the spinous ridges—every tiny fraction of an inch of living bone was replaced by an interstitial iron-carbon lattice, cushioned by dense, rubberized biopolymer discs that could absorb three tons of axial striking force without compressing a tiny fraction of an inch.
TING-TING.
A cascading chime—like twenty small silver bells struck in rapid row—sang out from inside Lin Ke’s back.
The shaking was so powerful that Meng Shan felt the metal hum travel up the leather straps into his own hands.
“By the mountain...” Meng Shan breathed.
“Ease the tension,” Lin Ke commanded softly.
Meng Shan slowly released the straps.
Apothecary He gently pulled the cedar neck brace away, his old hands shaking wildly.
Lin Ke pushed himself up from the workbench.
He stood.
Slowly. Rhythmically. Fully upright.
For the first time in his two lives, Lin Ke’s stance was geometrically flawless.
His shoulders fell naturally into line with his hips. His chest was broad, open, and easy. His spine felt not like a stack of fragile, aging bones. But like a solid, shaking-damped iron pillar running from his coccyx straight to the base of his skull.
He exhaled.
A puff of grey, stone vapor drifted from his lips. It carried the scent of forged steel and clean mountain rain.
Apothecary He reached out with a trembling hand. He pressed two fingers against the center of Lin Ke’s chest spine.
The healer pulled his hand back as if he had touched a freezing gravestone.
“It’s not human bone anymore,” He whispered in awed terror. “It’s... It’s an iron column. The shock-absorption... It’s fully silent.”
Lin Ke reached into his pocket, drew his iron metal pen, and pricked his thumb pad.
“Branch checked: main,” Lin Ke said, his voice deep, ringing, and carrying a metal timber that hadn’t been there before.
“Lin Ke,” Shen Yue’s voice suddenly called from the open blast doorway, breathless and panicked.
The young scribe stumbled into the cellar, her eyes wild with terror.
“The gate!” she cried, pointing toward the surface hall. “The ninety-six hours... They aren’t waiting for the deadline! Zhao Wuji’s audit delegation just arrived at the outer edge gate!”
Lin Ke glanced at the water-clock in the corner of the cellar.
Hour eighty-six.
They were ten hours early.
“Chai Gang is at the gate with five armed guards,” Shen Yue gasped. “And with him is Inspector Chai from the Punishment Hall! They’ve brought an Iron-Cracking Ram! They’re smashing through Elder Wu’s barricade right now!”
Lin Ke turned his head toward the workbench, where the final, most dangerous phase of the manual lay waiting.
The skull.
The skull vault.
The final ten percent of the commit.
Lin Ke looked down at his slate-grey hands, then toward the ceiling where the muffled, bone-shaking thuds of a battering ram began to shake the ancient stone dust from the rafters.
“They’re early,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat as a headsman’s ledger.
He picked up the final bowl of red stone slurry and the stoppered vial of Thousand-Year Glacier Dew.
“Then we speed up the deployment.”