The bone-shaking BOOM of the battering ram shuddered through forty feet of solid bedrock.
Dust sifted down from the vaulted ceiling of Cellar Four, coating the surface of the cooling troughs with fine grey powder.
“They breached the outer timber gate!” Shen Yue called from the hall, her voice trembling. “Elder Wu is shouting about Form 44-D, but Inspector Chai tore the parchment in half! They’re marching into the fire yard!”
Lin Ke didn’t look up from the anvil.
He was sitting cross-legged, his torso bare, his stance perfectly upright upon his newly forged iron spine.
Before him sat the final clay pot bowl. Two ounces of packed Red ink-Iron colloid, enriched with crushed magnetic iron nano-dust and three drops of Thousand-Year Glacier Dew.
Above his collarbones, his neck and skull were still living bone. Brittle, chalk-choked, and hardened by the poisoned manual.
The skull vault, Lin Ke analyzed coldly.
The most dangerous node in the entire stonework.
The skull was not a simple load-bearing strut like a thigh bone or a rib. It housed eighty billion neurons, cerebrospinal fluid channels, and the main neural bus of his mortal mind.
If the osteolytic dissolving ran too deep, brain pressure would spike instantly, causing cerebellar tonsillar herniation through the skull-base gap.
Instant, permanent brain death.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the standard split-second duty cycle against his skull model.
In test model, the osteolytic pulse hit his parietal plates.
The bone dissolved.
Instantly, the sudden spreading of body-energy gas inside the diploë layer spiked brain pressure by three hundred percent. The simulated Lin Ke’s eyes detached, blood burst from his ears, and his lower brain herniated downward.
Died at breath six.
Twelve split seconds is a sledgehammer, Lin Ke diagnosed. You can’t use a sledgehammer on a motherboard.
He re-architected the clock cycle for the skull.
He throttled the active osteolytic burst down from twelve split seconds to one-point-five split seconds.
Micro-bursts.
One-point-five split seconds active: strip a sub-hair-fraction film of surface turning to stone.
Fifty-eight-point-five split seconds rest: buffer brain crushing pressure, flush the micro-tiny blood vessels with sub-zero water Qi, and infuse the iron-red stone chelate into the skull stitches.
And to prevent heat encephalitis, the external skull had to be packed in an active ice-cold heat sink.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He opened his physical eyes. The cellar shook again as a second heavy impact rang through the stone ceiling.
“Apothecary He,” Lin Ke commanded, his voice cold and steady. “The shaved ice and cold spring mud. Pack my skull.”
He looked at the ancient healer, who was staring with wide, horrified eyes.
“Pack it now, He. Temples, back of the skull, forehead. Leave only my mouth and nose clear.”
The old apothecary didn’t hesitate. Decades of trauma surgery took over. He grabbed a wooden tub filled with crushed mountain runoff ice and stone-rich blue clay, packing the freezing sludge thick across Lin Ke’s scalp, temples, and the back of his neck.
The freezing shock hit Lin Ke’s skin like freezing liquid, turning his scalp fully numb within seconds.
“Shen Yue,” Lin Ke called out. “Pass the bowl.”
Shen Yue hurried forward, her bandaged hands steady as she held the baked-clay vessel to his lips.
Lin Ke tilted his head back and swallowed the packed Red ink-Iron colloid.
It tasted of raw copper, bitter sulfur, and the piercing, numbing frost of the Thousand-Year Glacier Dew.
The liquid hit his throat and diffused right away upward through the neck-artery canals into the circle of Willis.
Tianfu. Merge.
PULSE.
A drill of white-hot, electric fire pierced the center of Lin Ke’s forehead.
His teeth ached to their very roots. A blinding, painful pressure that made his jaw tremble against the cold mud pack.
Inside the bone of his skull, the one-point-split-second micro-pulses engaged.
Bzzzt. Rest. Bzzzt. Rest.
Thousands of micro-bursts per minute.
The ancient, stone-hard lime deposits that had choked his skull stitches and frontal plates for years were boiled away at the cellular level.
The external ice pack sizzled.
Dense, grey steam began to pour off the blue mud packed around his head. It boiled away into the cellar air as his skull radiated terrifying body-energy heat.
“His heat!” Apothecary He shouted, wildly slapping more shaved ice onto Lin Ke’s burning brow. “It’s forty-one point two! The ice is melting as fast as I pack it!”
“Keep packing!” Meng Shan roared, dumping a fresh bucket of cold spring water over Lin Ke’s shoulders.
Lin Ke didn’t move. He couldn’t move.
His mind was pinned to the central processing core of his mind.
He felt every skull stitch—the sun-fire, the sagittal, the lambdoid—unlocking, dissolving their hardened waste scum, and knitting shut with fine, interlacing fingers of slate-grey metal alloy.
Then came the purge.
A sharp, stinging pressure built behind his eyes.
Lin Ke’s eyelids flew open.
From the corners of his eyes, tears began to stream down his cheeks.
They weren’t clear saltwater.
They were dense, grey, stone tears. It was thick as molten lead. He carried the dissolved melted rock waste and toxic heavy metals from the poisoned manual straight out of his skull sinuses.
The grey tears dripped from his chin, hissing as they hit the ice on his chest and solidifying into brittle, dark pebbles of expelled waste scum.
His teeth locked together.
TING.
A high, crystal-clear ringing tone rang out from the top of his skull.
It was the sound deep ring of a seamless, iron-hard vault.
The micro-pulses died away.
The burning fever collapsed in an instant, sucked into the cold depths of the newly crystal-hardened Ashen Iron Lattice.
Across Lin Ke’s eyes, a cascade of pale grey system notifications scrolled with blinding speed:
Lin Ke sat in the total silence of the underground vault.
The blue clay and melted ice sloughed off his head, splashing onto the flat stone slabs.
He raised his hands.
His skin was pale, smooth, and clean. But beneath the outer skin, his entire skeletal framework hummed with a quiet, terrifying thickness.
He didn’t feel heavy in a sluggish, clumsy way. He felt anchored, grounded to the very crust of the earth, as though his bones were forged from the same earth-shaking bedrock that held the mountains aloft.
He reached up with his left hand, touching his brow, his temples, his jaw.
The bone was slate-grey beneath the skin, non-porous, smooth as polished jade, and cold as river steel.
He drew his iron metal pen from his pocket.
He pricked the pad of his left thumb.
Sharp. Real. Main.
“Branch checked: main,” Lin Ke spoke softly.
His voice didn’t waver. It rang with the deep, metal timber of a bronze bell struck in an empty cathedral.
BOOM!
The iron-and-oak blast door of Cellar Four exploded inward with an ear-splitting, bone-shaking roar.
The four-inch solid steel deadbolts snapped off like dry pine needles, clattering across the dark rock floor.
Splinters of oak and shards of iron flew through the air, clattering harmlessly against the stone anvil.
Through the cloud of sulfur dust and shattered wood stepped Chai Gang.
The chief guard stood six feet four inches tall, clad in heavy iron-plated brigandine, his sneering face scarred and twisted with vicious arrogance.
In his right hand, Chai Gang held his four-foot fluted iron heavy club, its heavy head resting casually against his armored shoulder.
Behind him crowded three armed debt-inspectors and the sneering figure of Inspector Chai. He held a crumpled legal warrant.
“Well, well,” Chai Gang chuckled, his voice echoing off the vault walls as he stepped over the shattered door frame. “Look at the little fire rat. Hiding in the cellar like a cockroach.”
Chai Gang raised the iron heavy club, pointing the fluted head directly at Lin Ke’s face.
“Ninety-six hours are up, Clerk Lin. The quarantine is voided. You’re under arrest for illegal hoarding, contraband trafficking, and gross insubordination.”
Chai Gang took two heavy, armored steps forward, his muscles bunching as he raised the eighty-pound iron heavy club with both hands.
“And before we drag you to the Punishment Hall,” Chai Gang grinned, baring yellowed teeth, “Young Master Zhao paid me twenty spirit stones to break every bone in your left arm.”
Lin Ke didn’t reach for a crowbar. He didn’t reach for a magic charm.
He simply stood up from the flat stone slabs.
Slowly. Effortlessly.
Standing a full inch taller than he had four days ago, Lin Ke raised his bare left forearm horizontally across his chest.
“Senior Brother Chai,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat as an open grave.
“Proceed.”