The iron sledgehammer struck the granite anvil with a blast wave that jarred the fillings in Lin Ke’s teeth.
A cloud of fine stone grit puffed out from under Meng Shan’s iron-soled boots.
The big man stood dead-center in the smelting ward’s open yard, shirtless in the biting morning wind, his broad torso covered in a crisscrossing web of dark grey cicatrices. His muscles looked less like flesh and more like weathered river shale, dense and unbending. It hummed with the low-hum drone of his patched Distributed Earth-Core Stance.
He hadn’t moved an inch.
“Again,” Meng Shan rumbled, his voice scraping like two paving stones grinding together.
Lin Ke stood ten paces back, his bandaged shins throbbing inside his boots with a dull, steady ache. In his hands, he held a set of carbon-rubbed surveillance logs provided by Elder Wu’s scared clerks. The tactical roster for Zhao Wuji’s hired vanguard.
“The frontal defense isn’t the problem, Meng Shan,” Lin Ke said, folding the parchment. “You can take four hundred pounds directly to the breastplate without flinching. Zhao’s people know that. They aren’t going to hit you where you’re thick.”
Meng Shan lowered his heavy arms, his brow furrowing. “The Three Wind Blades?”
“The Three Wind Blades,” Lin Ke confirmed. “Outer students from the West Ridge. Light agile footwork, weighted crescent daggers, trained specifically for circular flanking maneuvers. Under normal gravity, they’re an annoyance. Under three to five sea-weights of static Pagoda load, their circular driving force creates sideways tearing force.”
Lin Ke walked up to the big man. He tapped the iron metal pen against Meng Shan’s lower back, just above the beltline.
“When you plant your feet and rotate your torso to track a flanking target, where does the twisting torque go?”
Meng Shan reached back with a thick, calloused palm, touching his lower spine. “Here. The lower-back gate. That’s where the earth-vein Qi pivots.”
“A single point of failure,” Lin Ke said flatly. “In our last scrimmage, your sacroiliac joint took the full spinning shear of a deflected iron billet. Your spine bones were grinding like unaligned gears.”
The yard fell into total neural frozen stillness. The drifting flakes of soot froze midway between the chimney and the frozen mud. Meng Shan’s massive chest remained locked mid-breath.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the meet against the Three Wind Blades.
Run 01: Meng Shan plants both boots and parries the lead blade with his heavy tower shield. The second and third blades slip past his flanks at a sixty-degree angle, driving crescent daggers into his unarmored obliques. Meng Shan twists his torso forty-five degrees to crush them. The turning force wildly wrenches his L4-L5 spine bones. The spine shears sideways with a heard snap. Paraplegic collapse. Combat capability removed in 1.4 seconds.
Run 04: Meng Shan doesn’t rotate, absorbing the flank strikes on his iron-heavy ribs while lunging forward. Result: Daggers fail to pierce his stone-hard bone, but repeated lateral concussions create severe internal liver deep bruise and massive blood bruise. Collapse within forty paces.
Run 08: Meng Shan pivots his rear foot to reset his defensive axis. Result: Under raised Pagoda gravity, the turning foot loses traction on the slick flat stone slabs. The spinning heavy rush throws him off balance. He rolls like an overturned boulder, exposing his throat to downward dagger thrusts.
Lin Ke blinked, returning to meatspace.
The cold wind swept over his face. It cleared the phantom sensation of shattered bone grinding against spinal nerves.
He drew his iron metal pen, reversed it, and jabbed the needle into his left thumb. The dark bead of blood surfaced right away.
“Branch checked,” Lin Ke murmured. “Main.”
Meng Shan watched him in silence. The big man didn’t ask why Lin Ke pricked his thumb. He had seen the fire clerk do it dozens of times before impossible breakthroughs. Meng Shan simply waited, patient as a mountain quarry.
“We need to alter your grounding stance,” Lin Ke said, wiping his thumb. “You can’t absorb turning force in your spine. Your living joints can’t sustain that much shear under five-fold load. You need to offload the striking force directly into the mountain.”
Meng Shan looked down at his heavy boots. “The flat stone slabs are loose. If I twist, my heels slip.”
“Then we pin them,” Lin Ke said.
He walked over to the scrap bench, returning with two heavy, forged-iron ground-rods. Eight-inch spikes of cold-rolled spirit iron, narrowed at the tip and fitted with heavy steel collars that clamped directly onto the heels of Meng Shan’s boots.
“A tri-point load-balancing stance,” Lin Ke explained, kneeling to secure the clamps. “When you detect a flanking flight path, you don’t twist your upper body alone. You drop your balance point by four inches, kick your heels downward, and drive these spikes half an inch into the dark rock bedrock.”
Lin Ke tightened the iron bolts with a hand wrench, securing the rods to Meng Shan’s iron soles.
“Then, you route sixty percent of your earth-vein breath flow down the heel channels into the iron spikes. The mountain becomes your rear inner wall. When the flanker strikes your shield at an angle, the turning force travels down your obliques, bypasses your lower-back spine entirely, and vents straight into the stone below.”
Meng Shan stared down at the spiked heels, his heavy jaw working. “A grounded circuit.”
“Exactly,” Lin Ke said, stepping back. “Let’s stress-test the screen.”
Across the yard, four fire apprentices had rigged the melted rock waste drop-hammer. A four-hundred-pound block of solid cast iron suspended from an overhead frame crane by a thick iron chain.
“Meng Shan,” Lin Ke called out. “Flank angle forty-five degrees. Left flank.”
Meng Shan nodded. He widened his stance, exhaled a deep, rumbling breath. Then he stomped his heels into the yard’s dark rock paving stones.
CRACK.
The iron ground-rods bit into the rock with a bone-shaking crunch, powdering the granite around his heels and locking his lower frame into the bedrock. His earth-vein Qi surged downward, turning his legs into solid wooden support posts.
“Drop it!” Lin Ke commanded.
The apprentices knocked the retaining pin loose with a sledgehammer.
The four-hundred-pound iron block swung down in a massive, whistling arc, gathering lethal striking force across a twenty-foot swinging weight swing. It came in from the side, aimed directly at Meng Shan’s left shoulder-guard.
At the moment of impact, the sound was not a thud. It was a bone-shaking, ear-splitting BANG that rattled the roof tiles of the nearby smelting shed.
The iron hammer struck Meng Shan’s heavy shoulder plate.
Meng Shan’s massive torso didn’t twist. His spine remained straight as a master builder’s weighted drop-line.
Instead, the striking force channeled through his frame like lightning down a copper wire. Beneath his boots, the dark rock flat stone slabs exploded outward in a spiderweb of violent fractures, rock shards spraying twenty feet across the yard.
A deep, groaning shaking shuddered through the bedrock, venting into the mountain floor.
The four-hundred-pound iron block bounced backward off his shoulder, rattling wildly on its chain.
Meng Shan exhaled a long plume of grey, soot-scented steam. His torso was unbending. His boots were buried two inches deep in crushed granite.
He grunted, reaching up with a scarred forearm to wipe metal grey sweat from his brow.
“Solid,” Meng Shan rumbled, testing the posture of his lower back with a slight flex. “Zero grind in the bone. It took the whole blow.”
“It routes the shear into the planet,” Lin Ke said. He nodded as he inspected the fractured stone around the big man’s feet. “The Three Wind Blades will break their daggers on your shield.”
Meng Shan looked up, his dark eyes solemn and troubled beneath his heavy brow.
“Solid,” Meng Shan repeated quietly. “But Lin Ke... They aren’t the main threat. I spoke with a carter from the upper tier this morning. Zhao Wuji didn’t just hire the Wind Blades.”
Lin Ke looked at him. “Who else?”
“Iron-Fist Han from the Third Ward,” Meng Shan said, his deep voice dipping into a low, grim register. “Peak Qi Gathering Level Six. His knuckles are capped in spirit iron and soaked in toxic lead-copper draughts. He doesn’t look for balance points. When he hits, his poison flash-shatters bone on impact.”