Chương 96: The Perfect Vessel (2/3)

Its torso resembled a flayed ape of immense strength, the raw musculature knotted and corded beneath the surface like steel cables wound too tight. The flesh was swathed in layer upon layer of dark chitinous plates that overlapped like roof tiles, each segment glossy as lacquered wood and ridged with ancient scars—as though organic black armor had grown from its very body over countless centuries of unending labor.

The plates shifted subtly with each breath, producing a faint chittering sound like fingernails dragging across ceramic. It had no visible legs.

From the lower abdomen downward, its form narrowed and fused directly into the soot-dark stone of the forge floor, the transition between living flesh and dead rock so seamless that one could not discern where bone ended and bedrock began. Veins of blackened mineral ran up through the creature's lower torso like roots, pulsing faintly with the rhythm of the forge-fire beneath. It had long since become a permanent structural fixture of the cavern, an extension of the earth itself.

Hmm…

Unconsciously, Shi Yan's mind began to examine it with the cold efficiency of a tactical assessment, cataloging threat vectors and exploitable weaknesses. His weight shifted almost imperceptibly onto the balls of his feet, and then calculated: zero mobility. If this turns into a firefight, it can't pursue. No chase capability. No flanking. Pure static defense or offense within arm's reach only.

Yet what truly seized the eye were its arms—six in total, set in orderly, symmetrical pairs along its enormous ribcage like the limbs of some blasphemous insect deity. Each arm moved with eerie independence, performing separate tasks in a grotesque ballet of coordination that spoke of inhuman neural architecture.

The lowest pair was incomparably thick, each forearm nearly as wide around as a man's torso, the muscles beneath the chitin bulging with every squeeze. They clutched the hollow windpipes of massive, unknown oceanic beasts—each trachea longer than a grown man and ribbed with calcified cartilage rings—and used them as monstrous biological bellows. With methodical, piston-like compressions, the arms steadily drove the gray-blue corpse-gas deeper into the flames, forcing the spectral fire to roar higher with each pump.

The windpipes wheezed and groaned, expelling ancient dust and the stench of deep-sea rot with every exhalation.

The middle pair was leaner, almost delicate by comparison, ending in long, scorched fingers tipped with blackened nails that curved like talons. These hands wielded heavy iron tongs with surgical precision, shifting molten metal and bubbling marrow across the fossilized shell. Droplets of liquefied bone hissed and spat as they were repositioned, the creature's movements practiced and rhythmic, born of repetition spanning centuries—or perhaps millennia.

The tongs never wavered, never slipped, guiding the slag with the certainty of an artist arranging brush strokes.

The uppermost pair, however, inspired dread. The muscles upon those arms were grotesquely swollen, straining against the chitinous plates until hairline cracks webbed across the armor's surface. Each bicep was thick as a temple pillar, pulsing with veins that glowed faintly crimson, as though packed with terrifying hydraulic force that could rupture stone with a single blow.

In one hand, it held a hammer forged of blackened meteor iron, its surface covered in indecipherable runes that flickered with dying starlight. In the other, a hammer carved from the spined femur of some prehistoric apex predator, the bone polished to ivory smoothness by endless use, its striking face stained rust-brown with ancient blood that had seeped into the marrow and never washed away.

As Shi Yan watched, his gaze sharp and analytical behind the mask's eyeholes, the creature raised both hammers in perfect synchronization. The motion was slow, deliberate—an executioner's measured wind-up. Then it smashed them down upon a slab of glowing metal with apocalyptic force.

CLANG!

The strike reverberated through the alcove like a thunderclap contained within stone walls. The sound was not merely heard but felt—a shockwave that rattled bone dust on the floor and sent loose chains swaying on their hooks. The impact stirred the steam-filled alcove, and even the murky vapors quivered beneath its concussive force, rippling outward in visible rings like disturbed water. Shi Yan's armor plates vibrated against his chest, and he felt the pressure wave roll through his ribcage.

Sparks fountained upward in a brilliant cascade, painting the creature's chitinous form in flashes of molten orange before dying in the sulfurous air.

Shi Yan fixed his gaze upon its face—or rather, the place where a face should have been. Its head was a smooth dome of calcified bone, yellowed and dense as ancient ivory, the surface marred by hairline fractures and pitted scars. It was completely devoid of a mouth, ears, or nose—a blank canvas of suffering rendered in calcium and silence.

Where its eyes ought to have been, there were only uneven hollows, shallow depressions in the skull's surface, crudely sewn shut with thick black wire. The stitching was brutal and careless, the wire threaded through the bone itself in jagged X-patterns, pulling the edges of each socket tightly closed. Dried fluids—perhaps tears, perhaps something fouler—had crusted around the wire in brownish streaks, trailing down the blank face like permanent stains of weeping.

Across its massive chest hung a heavy, hardened artisan's apron, the kind a butcher might wear, though far larger and more grotesque. The leather—if it could be called leather—was thick and waxy, gleaming dully in the forge-light with an unnatural sheen.

Looking closer, one could see the varying pigmentation—patches of pale cream beside sallow yellow beside mottled gray. One could see the torn lips, shriveled and sewn into the seams. One could see the stretched pores, still visible despite the tanning process, and the faint lines where expressions had once lived. It had been stitched together from tanned human faces, dozens of them, overlapping and layered across the apron's surface like a madman's quilt.

Some faces retained portions of their features: a flattened nose here, a cheekbone's curve there, the remnant of an ear barely recognizable beneath the stitching. Eyes had been cut away, leaving only the stretched lids sewn flat against the leather. The whole obscene garment smelled of old smoke, cured flesh, and the bitter chemical tang of whatever alchemical solution had preserved it.

At this, Shi Yan's indifferent face contorted ever so slightly—a barely perceptible tightening around his eyes, a minute downward twitch at the corners of his mouth. His jaw clenched for half a second before he forced the muscles to relax.

At least I know what the local currency really is.

His gaze traced the seams where one face ended and another began, noting the careful—almost reverent—way they had been joined.

You don't wear human faces for decoration unless you're making a point about the cost of doing business. Each face was a transaction. Each scrap of skin, a life traded for iron.

And this creature… looks familiar?

Slightly tilting his head, the iron mask's hollow eyes catching the forge-glow, Shi Yan's mind swiftly sorted through the visual data with the methodical precision of a soldier cross-referencing enemy silhouettes against known threat profiles. Six arms. Fused lower body. Eyeless. His pupils moved rapidly behind the mask, tracking details, measuring proportions, calculating.

The original host's fragmented memories held only vague, terrifying rumors—bedtime stories whispered by low-ranking disciples about demonic smiths in the Netherworld, half-remembered warnings spoken in hushed voices around braziers during cold nights on outer sect patrols. Monsters that forged cursed blades. Creatures that ate fire and drank souls.

But combined with Shi Yan's own modern knowledge of ancient Earth mythology—the dry academic texts he'd read during sleepless nights in another life, the historical fragments of Warring States legends—the profile locked together perfectly, clicking into place like a magazine sliding home.

Six arms. Bodies of beasts. Featureless copper heads and iron foreheads. Surviving entirely on a diet of molten slag.

Shi Yan's eyes narrowed fractionally, his breathing controlled and even as he continued his silent assessment.

Isn't this like…

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. The mental file opened: ancient Chinese mythology, pre-dynastic period, tribe affiliated with the war god Chi You.

The Jiuli Tribe.

His gaze tracked the creature's rhythmic strikes, the perfect mechanical repetition, the absence of hesitation or fatigue.

Remnants of Chi You, the ancient War God who invented metallic weapons—bronze swords, iron spears, chariots fitted with scythed wheels. When the ancient emperors massacred them during the unification wars, their unyielding grudges must have sunk to the deep abyss of the Yellow Spring, unable to reincarnate, unwilling to dissipate. They fell through the cracks in reality and landed here, in this sulfur-choked underworld, still clutching their hammers.

This creature was not an artisan in any conventional sense; it was a biological weapon locked in a perpetual cycle of its own design, a cursed loop of purpose and punishment.

They did not forge treasures for wealth, nor did they understand mortal trade in the way merchants or sect elders did. They forged because war, resentment, and iron were their fundamental substance—the only remaining pillars of an existence stripped of everything else. Binding abstract horrors into material weapons was simply their biological imperative, as natural and necessary as breathing was to the living.

So why do they take commissions from living cultivators?

Shi Yan's gaze shifted from the massive hammers—still faintly glowing from the last strike—down to the apron stitched from human faces. His eyes traced the seams, counted the layers, noted the varying states of preservation.

The mental calculation continued, cold and analytical: The Jiuli Fiends operated on the absolute oldest, most brutal law of Chinese metallurgy: Xun Jian (Sword Sacrifice). It was the ancient folklore that stated divine or demonic iron could not be fully tempered without a human sacrifice bridging the gap between Heaven's metal and Earth's fire. Blood to awaken the blade. Soul to give it hunger. Life to anchor its edge in reality.

A Jiuli Fiend would indeed forge for a human. But the price was never mere silver, and seldom spirit stones—those were the currencies of the living world, meaningless to the dead. To rouse Yin-fire and seal a weapon's intent, this creature demanded the raw Yang-energy and soul essence of the customer to fulfill the Xun Jian blood-sacrifice, to complete the ancient formula written in the marrow of the world itself.

A decade of lifespan… A fragment of the soul…

Shi Yan narrowed his eyes further, his hand drifting almost imperceptibly closer to his waist, fingers flexing once in preparation, and, this time, looked at the smith once more with the cold assessment of a man evaluating an opponent.

The thing was, normal cultivators did not come to this market, as they could forge their spiritual weapons using pieces of spirit stone instead of their life or parts of their souls—clean transactions mediated by sect smiths, sanctioned by elders, bound by oaths and regulations. They paid in resources, not essence.

Only certain people came here—the desperate, the cursed, the outcasts, those whose crimes or cultivation methods barred them from legitimate forges. People who had nothing left to lose except the currency of their own existence, so the prices were… of course… a bit abnormal.

And…

Hmm…

His eyebrows furrowed slightly beneath the mask, the skin between them creasing as he ran through the logical chain.

Let's say, Hypothesis: The entity demands a fragment of Divine Soul as a toll to perform its function, utilizing the customer as the sacrificial fuel for the forge—burning years and essence like coal to fire the Yin-flames.

Variables: The toll relies on extracting Yang-vitality, stripping karmic threads, or feeding on Dantian reserves—all systems integrated into this world's metaphysical framework. All currencies native to cultivators.

Conclusion: I possess none of those things.

The truth settled over him like cold water: he was a foreign element. An anomaly.

[Host Entity: Foreign Soul Merged] [Heavenly Alignment: NULL (Daoless)] [Vessel Status: STABLE] No karmic threads tying him to the Wheel of Reincarnation. No Dao foundation to strip. No connection to Heaven's laws to sever. He was a ghost wearing borrowed flesh, invisible to the metaphysical economy that governed this realm.

But that is an assumption based on my knowledge…

The mental caveat lingered, a soldier's caution against over-reliance on untested intelligence.

Field test required.

The next moment, Shi Yan did not announce himself with a shout, nor did he raise his hands in the customary, respectful salute between cultivators—the clasped fist-and-palm gesture, the slight bow that acknowledged hierarchy. He merely stepped forward with measured, unhurried strides, bone dust puffing softly around his boots with each footfall, and walked up to the edge of the fossilized reptilian shell. His posture remained neutral, weight balanced, shoulders square—neither aggressive nor submissive.

The body language of a professional presenting terms, not a supplicant begging favors.

The six-armed Jiuli Fiend suddenly halted its measured forging. The rhythm broke. The black iron hammer and bone hammer hung suspended in midair, frozen at the apex of what would have been another strike. Not the slightest tremor passed through them, as though time itself had paused within the sphere of the creature's control. The bellows ceased their wheezing. The tongs stopped their careful manipulation. Even the flames seemed to dim slightly, as though the forge itself held its breath.

Though it possessed no eyes, its vast and featureless head slowly turned, pivoting on a neck thick as a barrel, facing unerringly toward the place where Shi Yan stood. It had already sensed the stirring of the air, the weight of his tread—heavier than a cultivator's lightness-technique should allow—and that strange emptiness where his presence ought to have echoed against the alcove's spiritual resonance. Where a living soul's Yang-aura should have blazed like a torch in the darkness, there was only… absence.

A void. A blank space in the world's text.

Beneath the oppressive gaze of those stitched eye-sockets, Shi Yan calmly unsealed his bio-locked spatial pouch with a practiced twist of his fingers, breaking the minor formation that keyed it to his spiritual signature—or rather, to the faint echo of one that his foreign soul had learned to mimic. The pouch's mouth yawned open, releasing a gust of stale, preserved air.

He reached within and abruptly dragged out the thing he had prepared, muscles tensing as he hauled the weight free with both hands.

Thump.

The massive severed arm looted from Demonic Physician Li—a heavily muscled, grotesque limb easily as thick around as Shi Yan's torso, covered in iron-like green scales that gleamed with an oily sheen and ending in jagged obsidian talons each as long as daggers—fell heavily onto the fossilized shell with a wet, meaty slap. The impact sent a spray of bone dust into the air and caused the shell to ring faintly, a low resonant note like a cracked bell.

The dense, iron-like scales glimmered with a latent, poisonous resonance, each plate edged in a faint corona of sickly yellow light that pulsed with residual demonic Qi. The flesh beneath was still disturbingly fresh, preserved by the creature's innate demonic vitality even in death—muscle fibers visible where the scales had been torn away, dark blood crusted along the edges, while the exposed bone at the severed joint exuded a faint, biting Yin-chill that frosted the shell's surface where it touched.

Veins as thick as fingers snaked beneath the translucent membrane between scales, still faintly purple with congealed blood. The stench of rotting meat and medicinal toxins wafted upward—formaldehyde, arsenic, something sharper and more chemical.

Then Shi Yan upended a leather sack with a practiced shake, the kind of motion a quartermaster might use distributing rations.

Clatter-clatter-clang.

Four shattered, high-grade flying swords, once wielded by the Cloud-Mirror Sect disciples, spilled across the shell in a discordant cascade of broken metal. The blades were snapped at various points—some near the hilt, others halfway down their length—and the spiritual arrays engraved along their flats had spiderwebbed into meaningless fragments, the formations bleeding out their remaining Qi in faint wisps of dissipating light.

Though their spiritual arrays had long since broken and could no longer be used—no longer capable of flight, no longer able to channel a cultivator's will—the spirit metal from which they had been forged still possessed considerable worth. The alloy itself was uncorrupted: silver-blue steel infused with powdered spirit stone during the smelting process, harder than mundane iron and naturally conductive to Qi. Raw material value, stripped of enchantment.

At last, he cast several medium-grade spirit stones—each one a translucent crystal the size of a child's fist, glowing faintly with captured spiritual energy—and a few silver taels atop the pile. The coins clinked against the scales, small and almost contemptuous in their mundanity. Mortal currency, just to round out the offer.

"Refine them together," Shi Yan said, his voice emerging flat and toneless through the Iron-Yaksha mask's mouth-grille, which distorted the sound into a cold and metallic rasp that echoed faintly against the alcove walls.

"Forge me a heavy saber. Let it be weighty and fierce. I have no need for any formation arrays embedded in it."

No flourishes. No spiritual enhancements. Just a killing tool built for mass and edge retention.

Let us see whether dead things value silver, Shi Yan thought to himself, his expression utterly still behind the mask, his right hand resting loosely by his waist in a deceptively casual posture—fingers slightly curled, thumb hooked near his belt, ready to draw in an instant if this negotiation turned kinetic. Or whether this is about to turn into a killing match.

The Jiuli Fiend remained motionless, frozen like a grotesque statue carved from flesh and chitin. Even its lowest pair of arms ceased working the bellows, the windpipes sagging silent in their grip.

Seconds stretched. The forge-fire dimmed further, the gray-blue flames retreating into the vent with a soft, almost plaintive hiss.

Soon, a harsh sound like rusted iron grinding against itself echoed through the alcove—the shriek of metal on metal, dry and grating, scraping along the inside of Shi Yan's skull despite the mask's padding. The creature itself had no mouth, its calcified dome smooth and unbroken, yet the tanned human faces sewn across its thick leather apron suddenly twitched. The dead eyelids fluttered. The shriveled lips trembled.

Their torn and shriveled lips slowly parted, cracking at the seams, revealing glimpses of yellowed thread and blackened leather beneath. From them emerged layers of overlapping, sorrowful voices—men, women, old and young, all speaking in unison yet fractionally out of sync, creating a nauseating chorus of despair.

"Iron... dead flesh..." the faces whispered, the sound scraping like a dull blade dragged across Shi Yan's ears, each syllable rasping and wet.

"The fire hungers... silver is a thing of cold... what living offering does the forge receive?"

The words were slow, ponderous, as though pulled from a deep well of ancient memory.

"I offer no blood sacrifice," Shi Yan replied evenly, his tone unchanged—flat, professional, immovable—without yielding half a step backward. His weight remained centered, his shoulders square, his breathing steady.

"These materials are my payment. Refine them well and forge what I require."

A statement of terms. Not a request. Not a plea.

The creature slowly bent down, its enormous, many-armed body looming above the crude anvil like a mountain of dead flesh threatening to collapse forward. Its featureless head lowered with agonizing slowness, vertebrae creaking audibly, until it hovered only inches before Shi Yan's mask—close enough that Shi Yan could see every pitted scar in the bone, every twisted knot in the black wire stitching.

Close enough that he could smell the thing: burned hair, old meat, sulfur, and underneath it all a faint sweetness like rotting flowers. The creature's breath—if it could be called breath—washed over him in a wave of hot, fetid air that reeked of molten slag and charred marrow.

"Iron must drink..." the faces on the apron hissed, their hollow eye-sockets wrinkling and puckering with grotesque animation, the skin folding inward as though invisible fingers pinched from beneath. The lips peeled further back, revealing the stitching that held them in place, threads pulled taut.

"Give the forge a thread of your soul... offer the fire the essence of your Dantian... give—" The overlapping voices abruptly cut off, severed mid-syllable as though someone had sliced through a vocal cord.

The Jiuli Fiend froze in place, its massive head mere inches from Shi Yan's mask, so close their reflections almost touched. Its massive head tilted ever so slightly—a minute adjustment, no more than a few degrees—as though seized by bewilderment.