The iron test-weight weighed four hundred pounds. It was crushing Lin Ke’s thigh muscles against his thigh bone like raw mutton under a cleaver.
A sharp, metal twinge shook through the core of his right thigh.
It wasn’t the ache of tired muscle. It was the sickening, high-pitched ringing of glass under uneven shear. The sound of his Lesser Yin spirit vein being pulled taut across the hardened ridge of his Ashen Iron Lattice bone.
Lin Ke stood in the backup testing cellar beneath Crucible Four, his bare feet braced against two grooved granite blocks.
Above him, an iron hoist held three cast-iron balance weights suspended by greased hemp cords. He eased his grip on the brake lever. Then, the downward striking force passed directly through the shoulder yoke. That forced his femurs to support four times his natural body mass.
His bones held.
The Ashen Iron Lattice—forged during the brutal trials of the smelting fire—didn’t bend. It possessed zero ductile give, standing as rigid as cast foundation wooden support posts.
The problem was everything else.
While his skeleton remained fully unbending, his organic thigh muscles tightly packed under the load, bulging outward by half an inch. The non-elastic glass channels fused to his bone-skin were caught in the middle, dragged laterally by shifting muscle fibers. Meanwhile, their bases remained pinned to unmoving iron bone.
A flow pushback mismatch, Lin Ke thought, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps through clenched teeth. The load-bearing frame is too stiff for the living harness.
If five-fold static gravity in the Pagoda crushed his muscle tissue downward. Meanwhile, his skeleton refused to yield, the differential shear would strip the glass waveguides clean off the bone like wire ripped from a circuit board.
He hauled back on the brake lever with both arms. The iron plates groaned, rising two inches, relieving the immediate pressure.
Lin Ke collapsed onto an upturned wooden crate. His hands shook as he wiped grey fire sweat from his eyelashes.
The cellar dropped into cold, dead stillness. The creak of the hemp rope froze. The dust motes floating in the yellow lantern light hung motionless in the air.
In his mind’s eye, Lin Ke simulated stepping through the bronze gates of the Gravity Pagoda into a sustained five-fold gravity pull.
Run 01: Standard upright gait. Result: On the fourth pace, the right vastus lateralis contracts under gravity load. The Lesser Yin channel is snapped at the thigh bifurcation. Instant internal heavy bleeding. Blood pressure drops to zero. Blackout in twenty seconds, cold and exact death in ninety.
Run 05: Low-center stance, distributing weight evenly across both knees. Result: Less lateral shifted weight, but upright squeezing pinches the glass channel against the top of the shinbone. Channel micro-fracture at step twelve. Energetic leakage triggers total spirit vein blast.
Run 12: Rigid bracing using external brass splints. Result: Muscle swelling creates hoop stress against the brass casing, snapping the channel at the ankle junction. Real body fatality: thigh rupture and blood bleedout.
Twelve simulations. Twelve gruesome, internal amputations.
Lin Ke gasped, jerking back into the waking world.
The phantom agony of his main thigh blood vessel tearing open left his right leg convulsing with sympathetic spasms. His stomach heaved, and he had to clamp a hand over his mouth to keep from vomiting bile onto his bare toes.
Phantom Death Syndrome, he reminded himself, dragging air into burning lungs. Your leg is still intact. Production is still online.
He drew his iron metal pen from his belt, reversed the grip. Then he jabbed the needle point into his left thumb pad.
The sharp sting broke the mental echo. A round bead of dark blood welled against the iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered, watching the crimson droplet catch the lantern light. “Main.”
He wiped the blood on his hemp trousers and leaned forward, staring at his bare shins.
He couldn’t soften the Ashen Iron Lattice. The rigid skeleton was the only thing that would prevent his organs from turning into jelly. Just then, the Pagoda’s formations reached ten or twenty times normal weight.
Nor could he make his glass spirit veins elastic. Their crystal-clear structure was congenital, incapable of stretching.
If the bone couldn’t flex, and the channels couldn’t stretch, then the screen between them had to be redesigned.
A heat swelling pre-tensioning loop, he calculated.
The Ashen Iron Lattice was an alloy of spirit-ore and stone-hard bone marrow. Like all metals, it had a heat swelling multiplier.
If he routed a nonstop, controlled micro-current of Crimson Yang fire through the outer bone layer before the clockwork load struck, the outer bone sheath would expand by about 0.02%.
That minute heat swelling would widen the tiny load-bearing grooves along his bone surface. That let the glass channels slide into sheltered recessed channels rather than sitting exposed to muscular shear.
It was an elegant building solution.
It was also fully insane. Heating your own skeletal frame from the inside was the body equivalent of wrapping a fire pipe in living meat.
Lin Ke closed his eyes, seated himself in the half-lotus on the cold stone floor. Then he reached down into his lower dantian.
He drew a hairline thread of Crimson Yang fire from the core vortex.
Slowly, deliberately, he directed the heat downward. He drove it into the deep marrow gates of both hip joints.
The pain arrived with the subtlety of an iron brand plunged into a bucket of lard.
Lin Ke’s back arched wildly, his head snapping back against the stone wall with a dull thud. A strangled hiss tore through his teeth as every nerve ending along his femurs screamed in unified terror.
It felt as though boiling lead were being injected directly between his flesh and his bones.
The outer layer of the Ashen Iron Lattice heated up. It stretched by fractions of a tiny fraction of an inch. Beneath the skin, his shins began to glow with a dull, cherry-red eerie glow.
The non-elastic glass spirit veins slid into the expanding grooves with a series of tiny, muted clicks that sounded inside his skull like cracking glass.
They seated. The load-bearing channels locked over them, forming an armored channel casing.
At the surface, the heat broke through his fat under the skin.
His trousers began to smolder, thin ribbons of white smoke curling up from the coarse fabric. Large, weeping blisters bubbled along his shins and calves, skin blackening and peeling away in ragged strips as the heat exhaust vented through his lower pores.
Lin Ke collapsed sideways onto the flat stone slabs, curled in a tight ball, his breath wheezing through scorched lips.
He didn’t pass out. He couldn’t afford to pass out. He lay there on the damp cellar floor, shivering wildly from systemic shock while his smoking legs radiated heat into the cold stonework.
Twenty minutes later, he dragged himself up the wooden steps into the upper alleyway behind the smelting yard. He leaned heavily on a birch walking stave.
Apothecary He’s medical shed sat fifty paces away. It smelled terrible, of boiled sulfur, vinegar, and dried toad-skin.
The old apothecary looked up from his brass mortar, his cloudy, yellowed eyes taking in Lin Ke’s blackened trouser legs. The weeping serous fluid pooled around his ankles, and the clear smell of charred skin.
He set his pestle down with a deliberate clatter.
“Sit down before you drop, idiot,” He rasped. He grabbed a clay jar of thick, greenish willow-bark salve.
Lin Ke collapsed onto the wooden check bench, letting his legs stretch out. The cold draft from the open door made the scorched tissue throb with sickening intensity.
The apothecary scooped a handful of the bitter, cold salve and began slapping it mercilessly over the raw blisters, uncaring of Lin Ke’s sharp breath in of breath.
“Your marrow smells like a blacksmith’s cooling trough, boy,” He muttered. He wrapped coarse linen bandages around Lin Ke’s smoking shins with brutal smooth speed. “What kind of madman cooks his own bones?”
Lin Ke leaned his head back against the rough cedar wall, his face pale and slick with sweat.
“A madman who intends to carry four hundred pounds,” Lin Ke whispered, “without his legs coming off at the hip.”