A Grave of Black Ice

The lead mastiff did not bark. It launched itself across the trampled mud with a silent, terrifying speed, its eighty-pound body a missile of dense muscle and snapping teeth.

Yul didn’t calculate his options. There was no time to weigh efficiency against risk. He only felt the heavy, suffocating heat of the burning thatch and the ugly, hot tightness in his chest where his grief had curdled into rage.

He didn't retreat into the trees. He stepped forward into the red mud of the village square.

The beast leaped, its jaws snapping for his throat.

Yul dropped. He didn't use the pristine, flawless evasion of the Ghost-Step; his bare heel slipped in a puddle of Granny Hu’s blood, his balance faltering. He fell hard on his left hip, but he used the messy momentum to roll beneath the flying mastiff. As the dog’s shadow passed over him, Yul drove the heavy, jagged stone in his right hand upward into the beast’s exposed ribs.

Thud.

It felt like striking a sack of wet sand wrapped in leather. The stone didn't break skin, but the sheer force—backed by the grounded hip-rotation Song Chi had beaten into him for months—cracked a lower rib.

The mastiff yelped, tumbling into the mud by the well stone, twisting frantically to bite at its own side.

Yul scrambled to his feet, his breath coming in ragged, whistling gasps. His right hand—the newly healed fingers—throbbed with a dull, sickening ache from the impact of the stone. The bone hadn't broken, but the weak, stiff tendons felt as if they had been stretched over hot coals.

"The little bastard hits hard!" the lead mercenary barked, his eyes narrowing through the drifting gray smoke. "Circle him! Don't let him get into the brush!"

The remaining two mastiffs split up, flanking Yul, their spiked collars rattling as they paced through the muck. Behind them, the four mercenaries fanned out, their hands resting on the hilts of their sabers. They weren't rushing. They were treating him like a cornered boar—letting the hounds take the bleeding edge while they waited for an opening.

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Yul backed toward the burning remains of the blacksmith’s hovel. The intense heat of the flames scorched the back of his neck, singeing his hair. His eyes stung from the grease and ash.

‘I am too small,’ the thought hit him—not as a cold, detached fact, but as a wave of bitter frustration that made his teeth grind. ‘If I had three more years—just three more years of growth—I would rip their throats out.’

He looked down at Granny Hu’s broken bamboo cane lying in the mud a few feet away. Beside it lay the small, woven basket of sweet potatoes she had been carrying before the mercenaries cut her down. One of the potatoes had rolled out, crushed beneath a mercenary’s spiked boot.

A sudden, violent tremor shook Yul’s small frame.

He didn't want to be empty. He didn't want to let the weight of the world pass through him like Song Chi had taught. He wanted to hold onto it. He wanted to take every ounce of the agony, the injustice, and the senseless slaughter of this quiet valley and force these men to swallow it.

The silver scars along his Ren meridian burned.

In the dark, dormant depths of his dantian, the black water of the Breath of the Frozen Void stirred. It didn't rise in a smooth, controlled stream; it surged backward like a tidal wave hitting a broken dam.

"Careful," one of the mercenaries muttered, stopping in his tracks. "The temperature just dropped."

The damp, heavy summer air around the blacksmith’s furnace suddenly turned brittle. The falling ash in the air didn't drift; it froze, turning into tiny, dark specks of soot-stained frost that hissed as they hit the hot mud.

"Kill him!" the lead mercenary shouted, drawing his saber with a metallic scrape. "Take the head now!"

The two mastiffs charged simultaneously—one from the left, aiming for Yul’s knee, the other vaulting over the broken well stone to strike from above.

Yul didn't dodge. He threw the heavy stone at the left hound, striking it squarely in the snout, and then reached out with his bare, scarred right hand toward the leaping beast above him.

He didn't use a martial arts technique. He simply grabbed the dog’s spiked iron collar and pulled, throwing his entire seven-year-old body weight backward toward the roaring flames of the forge.