The third night watch arrived with the heavy scent of ozone and wet soot.
Inside Furnace Cellar Four, the only light was the dull, cherry-red glow of the leftover embers banked inside Crucible One.
Lin Ke sat on the stone workbench, his brass measuring tongs resting in his lap, his eyes closed in deep quiet focus.
His breathing was nearly barely noticeable—four seconds in, four seconds held, four seconds out.
Beneath his skin, his Ashen Iron skeleton hummed with a quiet, underground deep ring, acting as a sound receiver that detected every micro-shaking traveling through forty feet of dark rock bedrock.
Click.
Three hundred paces to the north, a tripwire snapped inside the upper air-flow chimney pipe.
It wasn’t an animal.
An animal moved with irregular, chaotic weight.
This was the timed together, rhythmic padding of three trained fighters moving in tight delta formation across narrow iron grating.
Tianfu. Branch.
At double test model speed, Lin Ke modeled the engagement in less than four seconds.
In test model branch 01, he took cover behind the central casting anvil.
The three masked intruders dropped through the chimney pipe grate.
The leader, clad in midnight-black wolf-silk robes, didn’t engage in melee. He hurled an ivory-cased Earth-Buster Demolition Magic charm directly at Crucible One’s main brick base.
BOOM.
The bone-shaking blast wave collapsed the cellar ceiling, burying Lin Ke beneath forty tons of dark rock rubble.
He ran three more defensive branches.
In every branch where the intruders cleared the chimney pipe into the open floor of the cellar, they had room to deploy their ranged magic charms and three-point crossfire.
Never engage an attacker in open deployment, Lin Ke calculated coldly. Funnel the traffic. Force the packets into a single-threaded bottleneck where their bandwidth is throttled.
The tertiary exhaust chimney pipe was thirty inches wide.
To enter the cellar, the intruders had to crawl through a level iron pipe forty feet long, emerging one by one through an iron check hatch four feet above the floor.
A hardware chokepoint.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He opened his physical eyes, pricking his left thumb against the iron metal pen.
“Branch checked: main.”
He slipped down from the workbench without making a sound.
His boots were bare. His Ashen Iron feet stepped across the cold flat stone slabs with zero sound signed name, his metal skeleton damping every shaking before it could transmit into the stone.
He tapped Meng Shan on the shoulder with two fingers.
Meng Shan, who had been resting behind the melted rock waste bins, opened his eyes instantly. The giant quarryman didn’t speak. He rose like a mountain, his wide earth shield already strapped to his left forearm.
Lin Ke gestured to the dark ceiling corner where the tertiary exhaust hatch was bolted.
Shen Yue stepped out of the drafting nook. She held three small, tube-shaped paper tubes wrapped in fine copper wire. The new Magnetic Flashbang Canisters Lin Ke had designed using sub-hair-fraction magnetic iron dust and flash-powder.
Three breaths.
Two breaths.
Above their heads, the iron bolts of the check hatch turned slowly, lubricated by silent dissolving acid.
The round iron plate was lifted from its hinges without a scrape.
A masked face peered through the opening. It was narrow, wolfish eyes rimmed in dark kohl, scanning the shadowy cellar for movement.
The lead mercenary from the Shadow Wolf Trade ring reached into his sash, withdrawing a heavy, pulsating ivory scroll: an Earth-Buster Magic charm, primed to level the entire ward.
“Deploy artillery,” Lin Ke whispered.
Shen Yue moved with terrifying speed.
Her bandaged fingers flicked. A spark of spiritual intent ignited the fuse of the first copper canister. She hurled it straight into the open mouth of the exhaust chimney pipe!
The lead mercenary’s eyes widened in shock as the paper metal tube bounced off his forehead.
CRACK-FLASH!
It wasn’t a fire explosion.
It was a blinding, ten-thousand-lumen burst of magnetic-iron flash-powder, with an ear-splitting, faster-than-sound screech that rang inside the narrow iron pipe like a cannon shot.
“ARGH!”
A muffled, agonized scream echoed from inside the chimney pipe as the lead mercenary’s night-adjusted eyes were burned white.
The magnetic iron dust exploded into a white-hot cloud of sub-hair-fraction specks, instantly short-circuiting the spiritual circuits of the Earth-Buster Magic charm in his hand!
“Out! Drop down!” a panicked voice shouted from behind him in the pipe.
The lead mercenary tumbled out of the hatch, hitting the cellar floor in a flailing heap, his hands clawing at his blinded, burning eyes.
Behind him, the second mercenary lunged through the opening. It drew a serrated, six-inch flying dagger coated in dark green corpse-poison.
The second man’s Qi Gathering 5 training flared. He drove the dagger toward Lin Ke’s exposed throat in a blinding, desperate thrust.
Lin Ke didn’t draw a sword.
He didn’t activate an energy barrier.
He stepped directly into the strike.
His left hand shot out like an iron vise.
CLANG!
Lin Ke’s bare, unarmored fingers closed directly around the dropping poisoned steel blade.
The mercenary sneered, expecting the high-hum shaking and corpse-poison to sever the clerk’s fingers to the bone.
The blade stopped dead.
Lin Ke’s grip didn’t give a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch.
His slate-grey Ashen Iron finger bones didn’t crack. They clamped down on the steel with four hundred pounds of crushing force.
SNAP.
The high-grade poisoned steel dagger shattered in Lin Ke’s bare grip, breaking into three jagged pieces!
The mercenary recoiled in abject horror, staring at Lin Ke’s bare, unbleeding hand as if looking at an ancient demon.
“What... What are you—” the man choked out.
“Heat exhaust vent,” Lin Ke said deadpan.
Lin Ke thrust his right palm forward, planting the heel of his hand flat against the center of the mercenary’s chest.
Nine-Fold Crimson. Heat purge.
The carbonized scar tissue on Lin Ke’s right Laogong acupoint flared blazing bright white-gold.
BOOM!
A packed, high-pressure jet of white-hot heat exhaust erupted from Lin Ke’s palm, blasting through the mercenary’s silk armor and blowing him ten feet across the cellar.
The mercenary slammed into the heavy brick base of Crucible Four with a sickening THUD, collapsing unconscious onto the sand bed with all the air driven from his lungs.
At the chimney pipe hatch, the third mercenary tried to crawl backward up the pipe.
THUD!
Meng Shan leaped onto the anvil, thrusting his heavy iron-rimmed shovel straight into the chimney pipe opening, driving his Distributed Earth-Core Stance into the metal until the pipe buckled, trapping the third intruder’s legs in crushed iron.
“Stay there,” Meng Shan growled, his voice shaking through the pipe like an earthquake.
Ten seconds.
The entire engagement had lasted less than twelve seconds.
The cellar was quiet once more, save for the groans of the blinded lead mercenary writhing on the flat stone slabs.
Shen Yue hurried forward, binding the lead mercenary’s arms and legs with pre-treated spirit-suppressing ropes, her hands steady and efficient.
Lin Ke knelt beside the unconscious mercenary who had hit the fire bricks.
He stripped the man’s dark wolf-silk cowl. He showed the weathered, scarred face of a skilled Shadow Wolf Trade ring assassin.
Lin Ke reached into the inner lining of the assassin’s tunic.
He pulled out the ivory-cased Earth-Buster Magic charm, setting it carefully on the workbench.
Then, his fingers brushed against a stiff roll of thick parchment sealed in oiled silk.
Lin Ke drew it out and unrolled it beneath the animal fat lamp.
It was a formal promissory note for two thousand spirit stones, payable upon the confirmed total destruction of the Seventh Smelting Ward’s crucibles and the elimination of Assistant Clerk Lin Ke.
And at the bottom of the thick parchment, stamped in fresh, vermilion red stone paste, was the personal, private merchant crest of Zhao Wuji.
Meng Shan leaned over Lin Ke’s shoulder, his jaw tightening into a murderous knot.
“A signed murder contract,” Meng Shan growled, his fists shaking. “From Zhao Wuji himself. Brother Lin... We have him. This is an open-and-shut capital crime under sect law. We take this to the Disciplinary Hall at sunrise, and Zhao Wuji will be carried out on the Thousand Sword Cliff!”
Lin Ke looked down at the vermilion merchant seal, then looked toward the dark hall leading to the surface.
His eyes were cold, still, and calculating.
“No,” Lin Ke said softly, slipping the promissory note into his sleeve. “If we take this to the Disciplinary Hall... Zhao Wuji walks out a free man.”