The air in the shattered cellar smelled of fresh oak splinters and old blood.
Chai Gang took half a step back, his eyes widening in disbelief, then narrowing into a poisonous, bloodthirsty slit.
A mortal-born fire clerk, naked to the waist, barefoot on the flat stone slabs, was raising a bare arm to challenge an eighty-pound fluted iron heavy club.
“You suicidal little insect,” Chai Gang snarled.
The guard’s Qi Gathering 4 training erupted. Thick, yellow-brown Earth Qi swirled around his muscular shoulders, coursing down his thick forearms into the fluted iron heavy club until the heavy metal whistled with moving fury.
He didn’t hold back. He swung with the full, merciless execution of a mountain-cleaving strike. A downward slanted arc calculated to smash through the raised forearm, crush the ribs beneath, and drive the broken corpse into the flat stone slabs.
Lin Ke watched the arc go down.
To his upgraded visual cortex, the strike was shockingly, leisurely slow.
Tianfu. Branch.
In the grey sandbox, Lin Ke ran the defensive math.
He could step laterally and vent Nine-Fold Crimson fire into Chai Gang’s throat. He could signal Shen Yue to detonate an Iron-Flame Wall Magic charm at Chai Gang’s knees.
He rejected both.
This is an acceptance test, Lin Ke noted coldly. An public works validation run. I need real-world tracking data on the Ashen Iron Lattice under peak dynamic loading.
In the mental model, Lin Ke adjusted his stance:
Shift twelve percent of body weight to the left heel.
Lock the newly lined up lower-back bones into a sixty-degree crushing angle.
Anchor the glass spirit veins to the Ashen Iron bone-skin sleeves, using the metal lattice as a nonstop sound and moving ground.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
Zero seconds elapsed in meatspace.
The iron heavy club screamed through the air. It tore through the yellow lantern light with bone-shattering speed.
Lin Ke’s left arm didn’t flinch.
He didn’t brace with his right hand. He simply rotated his left forearm five degrees to present the dense, slate-grey outward ridge directly to the dropping fluted steel.
CLANG!
It wasn’t the wet, crunching sound of bone splintering.
It was the ear-splitting, total sound of a high-speed locomotive striking a solid granite mountainside.
A blast wave of tightly packed air exploded outward from the point of impact, blowing the animal fat lamps out in an instant, leaving only the dull red magma glow from the floor vents.
The three debt-inspectors standing by the shattered door clapped their hands over their ears, crying out in pain as the sonic boom tore through the enclosed vault.
In the center of the cellar, time seemed to freeze.
Lin Ke’s left arm had not dropped a single tiny fraction of an inch.
His skin had not broken. Along the pale flesh of his forearm, a faint, white pressure line marked the impact point. It faded back to natural skin tone in three seconds as the blood-vessel tiny blood vessels rebounded.
The iron heavy club, however, was no longer straight.
The eighty-pound bar of forged sect iron had bent wildly at the point of impact. It warped into an absurd, thirty-degree dogleg!
CRACK.
The blasting blast wave didn’t stop at the arm.
It followed the precise grounding path Lin Ke had calculated. Flowing from his radius through his upper arm bone, crossing his locked shoulder joint, dropping like an electric current down his newly lined up Ashen Iron spine, and discharging through his slate-grey femurs and tibias directly into the floor.
Beneath Lin Ke’s bare feet, two massive dark rock flat stone slabs shattered into webs of white powder, sinking two inches into the bedrock as they absorbed twenty-four hundred blasts of heat of moving load.
Lin Ke didn’t even blink.
He stood in the smoking dust. He looked down at the bent iron heavy club with deadpan, office indifference.
“Senior Brother Chai,” Lin Ke said, his deep, ringing voice cutting through the ringing silence.
“You appear to have damaged sect mining equipment against an authorized office desk.”
Chai Gang’s jaw was slack. His eyes were wide, white, and bulging with a terror that bypassed thought and struck straight into his primal animal marrow.
The guard couldn’t speak.
The moving recoil from the impact had traveled backward up the rigid iron shaft into his own hands.
Chai Gang’s wrists were out-of-joint. The webbing between his thumbs and forefingers had torn open, dripping dark, hot blood across his armor.
His fingers were numb, trembling wildly, unable to maintain a grip on the bent weapon.
The mangled eighty-pound heavy club slipped from Chai Gang’s bloody fingers.
It hit the cracked flat stone slabs with a dull, heavy, pathetic clang.
“You...” Chai Gang stammered, his knees shaking, stepping backward until his back hit the shattered door frame. “You... What are you? Your arm... That was eighty pounds of forged iron! You’re... You’re a monster! A demonic golem!”
The three debt-inspectors dropped their cudgels in terror, their faces pale as curdled milk.
“He blocked it with bare bone...” one checker whimpered, backing out into the hall. “He bent Senior Brother Chai’s heavy club with his arm!”
Behind them, Inspector Chai—the legal clerk from the Outer Court—stood frozen in the doorway. He grabbed his crumpled check writ. The man’s high-born composure had vanished, replaced by the shivering dread of a rabbit that had just kicked open a dragon’s cave.
Lin Ke took a single, measured step forward.
His bare boot came down on the broken dark rock.
The sound was not the soft patter of human flesh. It was a heavy, stone-shattering thud—a quiet declaration of huge, unbending mass.
Standing a full inch taller than he had four days ago, his shoulders square and broad, his spine perfectly upright, Lin Ke radiated a dense, choking physical gravity that seemed to distort the very air around him.
He reached down with his left hand—the arm that had just bent an iron heavy club—and effortlessly picked up the thirty-degree warped steel bar with two fingers.
He held the bent weapon out toward Inspector Chai.
“Senior Brother Chai,” Lin Ke said calmly, his pitch-black eyes fixing onto the scared clerk. “Under Sect Occupational Health and Work-yard Protection Statute 88, Clause C... Intentional destruction of ward public works carries a forced compensatory heavy tax.”
Lin Ke tossed the bent iron bar at Inspector Chai’s feet.
The metal bounced with a sharp chime.
“And now,” Lin Ke continued, stepping over the threshold into the light of the hall, “let’s discuss your backdated audit writ.”