The leftover five masked swordsmen were hardened killers. But watching their lead scout get swatted into the drainage ditch like an annoying fly by an unarmored mortal laborer gave them a moment of deep, paralyzing pause.
They were Foundation Establishment fighters. They had spent decades refining their dantian, purifying their spiritual veins, and mastering the sacred martial arts of the outer sects. To them, mortal laborers were cattle. Fragile, breakable things that could be crushed with a casual wave of spiritual pressure.
Yet the man standing before them on the three-pace raised stone road didn’t fit their understanding of reality.
Tie Shan stood with his bare bronze chest glistening under the falling dew, his breathing slow, steady, and unrushed. There was no spiritual qi streaming from his spirit veins. There was no old family protective barrier shimmering around his skin. There was only raw physical thickness. Two hundred and forty pounds of dense muscle, hardened bone, and ruthless, unaugmented clockwork leverage.
“Together!” the second swordsman hissed, his voice trembling with panicked rage. “Surround him! Flank the sides!”
The clash of steel against cold-drawn iron echoed through the vast white jade vault like thunder rolling across an alpine canyon. The three swordsmen fought with the desperate, cornered savagery of men who knew their lives were forfeit if they failed to breach the raised stone road. Their scimitars blurred in overlapping green arcs. It hissed through the steam. Their boots splashed wildly in the knee-deep water as they tried to find a…
