The rear loading dock of the Central Smelting Pavilion was lit up by the violent crimson glare of the overloaded fire vents.
The heat was staggering, thick with the stench of boiling liquid silver, lead vapors, and roasted sulfur. Even fifty paces away, the stone flags were hot enough to soften the pitch on the wagon wheels.
Overseer Meng stood on the raised timber platform, his greasy silk robes drenched in sweat, a wet cloth clamped over his mouth to stifle his violent coughing fits. In his trembling right hand, he held an iron-tipped bullwhip. With every breath, his chest rattled with the wet, rotting sound of rotting marrow.
Before him stood forty indentured coolies, their bare backs glistening with soot and sweat. They carried heavy pine crates from the smelting cellar into the three armored wagons of the Black-Viper Triad.
Each crate was packed with hundreds of mottled yellow pills. The counterfeit Marrow-Tempering Pills forged from toxic lead waste scum, sulfur powder, and tightly packed clay.
A sixteen-year-old coolie stumbled under the weight of a seventy-pound crate, his foot catching on an iron rail. The crate crashed to the stones, spilling dozens of yellow pellets into the boiling drainage gutter.
Meng shrieked in fury, lunging forward with his whip.
CRACK!
The iron-tipped leather ripped across the boy’s shoulders, opening a five-inch bloody jagged cut. The boy screamed, curling into the ash.
“Clumsy dog!” Meng roared, his voice cracking into a bloody cough. “Those pills are worth forty silver bits a crate! You break another, and I’ll throw you into the lower melted rock waste vats alive!”
Standing beside the lead wagon was the leader of the Black-Viper escort: Viper Chen.
Viper Chen was a lean, vicious fighter of the late Foundation Establishment realm, dressed in tight green reptile leather, his pale face adorned with dark snake-like tattoos across both cheeks. Across his back hung his signed name weapon. A six-foot heavy steel chain attached to a crescent-shaped poisoned scythe.
Chen spat a mouthful of bitter betel nut onto the stones, his cold, reptilian eyes surveying the loading process with sneering disdain.
“Move faster, Overseer Meng,” Chen hissed, his voice sounding like a serpent sliding through dry leaves. “The dawn bells of the Upper Sect will toll in two hours. If the patrol eagles catch us on the northern pass with three wagons of contraband medicine, my brotherhood won’t take the blame alone.”
“The batch is nearly loaded, Brother Chen!” Meng pleaded, wiping blood from his lips with trembling fingers. “Two hundred crates! Eight thousand pills! Every outer student in the lower valleys will buy them before the winter tournament!”
High on the dark rock ridge overlooking the loading dock, Lin Tao and Tie Shan crouched in the shadow of a shattered cooling tower.
Through his left eye, Lin Tao examined the chemical profile of the spilled yellow pellets:
Eight thousand pills of packed liquid silver and lead. If these crates reached the outer market towns, hundreds of young students from poor mortal families—boys who had spent their families’ life savings to purchase a single marrow pill—would suffer complete nerve destruction and rotting core failure.
“Poison,” Tie Shan rumbled softly, his jaw set like chiseled granite. “Murders children.”
“Eight thousand counts of capital poisoning,” Lin Tao said quietly. “In the Azure Cloud Sect, manufacturing counterfeit medicine carries the penalty of soul dissolving. Meng has signed his own execution ten times over.”
Before they could withdraw to the shadow of the ridge, a pebble shifted beneath the dark rock ledge.
A tiny clatter echoed down the cliff face.
Viper Chen’s head snapped upward with unnatural, reptilian speed. His slit-pupil eyes locked onto the two silhouettes perched against the red glare of the fire chimney.
“Rats on the ridge,” Chen hissed, a cruel smile curling his thin lips.
Chen gestured with his finger. Four armed hired blades wearing black leather vests and carrying poisoned short swords detached from the wagons, scaling the rocky switchback trail with silent, lethal agility.
“Slit their throats,” Chen ordered calmly. “Toss their bodies into the smelting vats. No witnesses leave the volcano bowl tonight.”
The four hired blades grinned, their yellowed teeth gleaming in the red fire glare. They slipped into the shadows of the cooling towers, their bodies moving with the silent, fluid grace of hunting beasts stalking easy prey on a dark mountain path.
On the loading dock, Overseer Meng continued to scream at the exhausted coolies, his bullwhip cracking against the stones with wild fury.
He was coughing every three breaths now, thick sprays of red foam splattering across his bronze breastplate. He knew that if this shipment was delayed, the Black-Viper Triad wouldn’t hesitate to slit his throat and take the silver for themselves. In the underworld of the outer valleys, a failed smuggler was worth less than a dead dog in a ditch.
High above on the rocky trail, Lin Tao stood fully motionless in the shadows. His left eye tracked the four heat signed names moving up the defile.
“Four targets,” Lin Tao whispered softly into the dark.
Beside him, Tie Shan sank into a low, hungry crouch, his twelve-pound iron bar resting across his thighs. The giant didn’t need armor. His newly forged Iron-Bone thickness gave him the impact pushback of solid bronze. But he knew the deadly nature of mercenary work. These were not scared quarry overseers. But skilled cutthroats who dipped their blades in viper venom to ensure that even a flesh graze proved fatal within ten heartbeats.
“Poison on blades,” Tie Shan rumbled, his nostrils flaring as he caught the oily, bitter scent on the wind. “Black viper venom. Numbs heart in twenty breaths.”
“Then don’t let the steel touch your skin,” Lin Tao said, his left eye calculating the spatial interception lines across the dark shale trail. “A poisoned blade needs moving speed to pierce the deep skin. If you take their driving force away, their steel is no more dangerous than a dry willow twig. I take the ground. You take the driving force.”