The smell of raw mutton fat and wet leather filled the lower terrace of the central market.
A crowd of sixty outer students had formed a tight, fearful circle around the stone fountain. In the center of the ring stood Meng Shan, his broad back braced against the rim of a water trough. He held his heavy, iron-rimmed quarry shovel in a two-handed defensive guard.
Standing ten paces in front of him was Yan Chuan.
The butcher of the Blood-Sabre Pavilion had already drawn four feet of serrated, black-iron steel from its greasy sheath.
The blade was not smooth. Along its curved edge ran hundreds of three-sided teeth. It shook with a high-pitched, insectoid buzz that made the surrounding students’ ears ring with piercing discomfort.
“Come on, rock-hauler,” Yan Chuan purred, his yellow slit-pupils fixed on Meng Shan’s chest. “Your Seventh Ward is very loud with its lawsuits and petitions. Let’s see if your guildmaster charter can stop a Blood-Saw slash.”
Meng Shan’s jaw was set like a slab of granite. His broad chest rose and falling in heavy, disciplined rhythms.
“Sect law forbids unsanctioned duels in the public market, Senior Brother Yan,” Meng Shan rumbled. His voice low and shook with earth intent. “Sheathe the steel.”
“Sect law?” Yan Chuan laughed, a wet, sickening bark. “I’m merely conducting a friendly weapon fine-tuning.”
Yan Chuan’s Qi Gathering 6 training erupted.
A blood-red aura surged down his gaunt arms into the serrated sabre.
The blade’s shaking spiked into an ear-splitting, faster-than-sound shriek, blurring into a crimson crescent. He stepped forward in a blinding, downward slanted cleave aimed directly at Meng Shan’s left collar bone!
Lin Ke cleared the crowd at that exact heartbeat.
Tianfu. Branch.
At double test model speed, Lin Ke disassembled Yan Chuan’s attack into fluid dynamics and clockwork sideways tearing force.
Traditional defense: Meng Shan blocks straight-across with his flat shovel blade, bracing with locked wrists.
In test model, Yan Chuan’s serrated blade struck the flat iron.
The high-hum shaking didn’t just push—it operated like a high-pitched bone-saw.
The moving back-and-forth swing bypassed the rigid steel, entered Meng Shan’s locked wrists, and induced high-wave height shear waves in his distributed earth channels.
The channels suffered high-pressure bubbling blast. Blood vessels in Meng Shan’s lungs burst from the shock. The shovel blade snapped in half like dry pine.
Never meet a shaking shear tool straight-across to the cut, Lin Ke calculated with chilling care. You don’t fight high-pitched shaking with static pushback. You deflect the vector and ground the back-and-forth swing into the bedrock before deep ringing hum can build.
Optimal defensive shape:
Angle of incidence: thirty degrees upward bending.
Wrist flow pushback: fully decoupled (free floating, zero rigid brace).
Grounding bus: left heel lined up with the earth-shaking shear plane of the flat stone slabs.
Lin Ke cut the branch.
Zero point one seconds elapsed in meatspace.
The shaking blood-sabre was four feet from Meng Shan’s shoulder and dropping at seventy miles per hour.
Lin Ke didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t rush into the blade.
He projected his voice with the sharp, ringing sound amplification of his Ashen Iron skull:
“Meng Shan!” Lin Ke’s voice sliced through the market like a crack of thunder.
“Angle the blade thirty degrees upward! Ground through the left heel! Don’t brace the wrists!”
Meng Shan didn’t hesitate.
A soldier trained to trust his systems engineer didn’t ask for a second opinion.
Meng Shan relaxed his locked forearms, tilting the heavy iron shovel head thirty degrees toward the sky, shifting eighty percent of his mass backward onto his left heel, unlocking his wrists to let the tool float on its balance point.
SCREEEEEECH-CLANG!
The serrated blood-sabre struck the angled face of the shovel.
It didn’t bite into the metal.
Because the angle was sloped, the high-hum teeth couldn’t establish traction on the steel surface.
The blade slid wildly upward along the thirty-degree incline. It screamed like a dying cat as sparks erupted in a blinding, crimson shower!
The terrifying shaking energy didn’t enter Meng Shan’s body.
Decoupled by his relaxed wrists, the moving shock bypassed his arms entirely, flowing along the angled shovel handle, traveling down his left leg through his Distributed Earth-Core Stance, and dumping straight through his left heel into the market flat stone slabs.
CRACK-BOOM!
Beneath Meng Shan’s left boot, three heavy granite paving flags shattered into fist-sized rubble, blown apart by the discharged blasting blast wave!
Meng Shan stood fully unmoving.
His face was calm, his breathing steady, his ribs intact, his shovel blade unscratched.
Yan Chuan, however, was wildly over-extended.
His dropping driving force had glanced off the forty-five-degree bending with zero pushback. Because of that, the butcher stumbled two paces forward, his blade biting deep into the empty dirt of the vegetable stall, spraying wet cabbage leaves across his silk boots.
The entire market went dead silent.
Sixty outer students stared at the shattered paving stones beneath Meng Shan’s heel, then at the stumbling Qi Gathering 6 senior student, their jaws hanging open.
“What in the nine hells...” a student whispered.
Yan Chuan ripped his serrated sabre from the dirt, his yellow eyes blazing with humiliated, feral fury.
“You filthy quarry slave!” Yan Chuan snarled, spinning around with raised steel, preparing to unleash his full seventh-stage Blood-Vortex technique to slaughter Meng Shan where he stood.
A shadow fell between them.
Lin Ke stepped directly into the space between Yan Chuan’s blade and Meng Shan’s shovel.
Lin Ke was unarmed. His hands were tucked inside the wide sleeves of his worn clerk robes.
His stance was fully upright, streaming the dense, quiet, terrifying mass of an unmoving mountain.
From the northern gate of the terrace, the rhythmic clatter of bronze armor and heavy boots echoed across the cobblestones.
“Punishment Patrol incoming,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat, level, and deadpan.
He looked Yan Chuan straight in his yellow, bloodshot eyes without blinking.
“Under Sect Check Regulations, Article 04, Section B... Any registered check tester who engages in lethal brawling within thirty days of the Grand Opening is subject to immediate, permanent disqualification and forfeiture of sect candidacy.”
Lin Ke tilted his head slightly.
“You strike now, Senior Brother Yan... And your contract with Young Master Zhao is voided before you collect your second payment.”
Yan Chuan froze.
The serrated sabre hung six inches from Lin Ke’s chest, its shaking teeth buzzing like an angry hornet.
Ten paces away, an outer sect patrol of eight armored guards rounded the corner, their copper whistles shrilling through the square.
Yan Chuan’s jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his cheeks twitched.
He looked at Lin Ke’s unblinking, pitch-black eyes. There was no fear there. No flinching. Only the cold, analytical gaze of a man measuring the cutting edge of a tool against the hardness of an anvil.
Yan Chuan slowly lowered his sabre.
He wiped the dirt from the serrated edge against his palm, his yellow pupils narrowing into razor-thin slits.
SHING.
The blade slid back into its greasy leather sheath with a crisp, oily click.
Yan Chuan leaned in close to Lin Ke, his breath smelling of raw copper and decaying blood.
“Well coached, little clerk,” Yan Chuan whispered. His lips pulled back in a terrifying, jagged smirk.
“You know your angles. You know your fine print.”
Yan Chuan tapped the iron handle of his sabre with a blackened fingernail.
“Let’s see if your mouth can ground gravity on the fourth floor of the Pagoda. When the ceiling presses ten sea-weights into your skull... I’ll carve that clever tongue from your mouth with my own teeth.”
Yan Chuan turned on his heel and melted into the crowd of scared onlookers, vanishing into the shadows of the upper alleys.
The market began to breathe again.
Meng Shan lowered his shovel, letting out a long, heavy breath that shook his broad shoulders.
“Brother Lin,” Meng Shan muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. “That blade... It felt like an earthquake.”
“It was a high-pitched saw,” Lin Ke said. He looked down at the shattered paving stones beneath Meng Shan’s heel. “He relies on high-hum moving shear to bypass traditional defense.”
Lin Ke looked toward the towering, nine-story dark shape of the Bone-Crushing Gravity Pagoda rising above the mountain mist in the distance.
“He won’t be alone in that tower,” Lin Ke said quietly. “Zhao Wuji will have a five-man fireteam coordinated against us.”
Lin Ke turned back to Meng Shan.
“We have twenty days left. It’s time to stop training as individuals.”
He looked into Meng Shan’s eyes, a cold, focused light burning in his own.
“It’s time to lock our three-man formation.”