The ash road turned to black basalt glass, slick and steaming as it snaked upwards. Ma Jianzhou’s lungs burned, a raw, blistering fire that threatened to seize his breath with every dragging footfall. The anvil bit deep into his shoulder blades, its iron hot against raw skin. Yet, within the agony, the strange, cold density in his sinews intensified, knitting bone and muscle into something unnaturally resilient. Sulfur and the acrid tang of calcined marrow thickened the air at the sect's outer threshold. The stronghold rose in terraced tiers cut directly into the hollow mountain's throat. Cracks in the rock wall oozed orange slag and vented bursts of scalding gas. Disciples in cinnabar robes moved along the walkways, the Qi rolling off their shoulders distorting the air like furnace wash. At the main gate, a gaping arch of obsidian, two hulking guards with faces scarred by heat stood sentinel, their gazes flat and disdainful. As Ma Jianzhou, bent double beneath the anvil, shuffled past the gate, a ripple of laughter spread through the assembly of disciples gathered near a soaring spire. “Look at that decrepit beast of burden!” a young woman with a sharp, cruel face shrieked, pointing with a slender, jade-tipped finger. “Are they bringing scrap iron to the foundries on a human cart? What era is this?” Her companions jeered, their clear voices echoing off the basalt. “Perhaps it’s the sect's new ration scheme,” a burly youth sneered, flexing an arm swollen with tempered muscle. “Recycling the dead before they’re even cold!” Nie Ruhai catalogued their posture, age, and marrow density as if appraising ore, then jammed two fingers into the small of Ma Jianzhou's back. Ma stumbled, catching himself before he fell, the anvil’s base scraping against the polished obsidian. The sound was like nails on a funeral pyre, sharp and grating. The chatter ceased when Elder Pei Lingshuang stepped down from a higher terrace, her dyed silks snapping in the updraft. Her chin tilted as she surveyed Ma Jianzhou’s soot-crusted back and the mute smith behind him. “So, the thief of body art and his voiceless master arrive,” she said, her voice cutting through the hiss of the vents. “You crippled my enforcers, old dog. You spat on our hall.” Her eyes narrowed, fixing on the behemoth strapped to Ma’s back. Crude pig iron, brittle and unrefined, sat strapped to his spine—worthless dross to any sect artisan. “Throw them into the Deep Forge,” she commanded, a slow smile spreading across her lips, revealing teeth too perfect for a human. “Let them dissolve with the slag. Let them choke on the magma.” The two gate guards, massive and unthinking, moved instantly. They grabbed Ma Jianzhou by his weary arms, hauling him forward. Nie Ruhai let the guards haul him along, stepping into the white-orange haze radiating from the abyss. Vaporized bronze and the sharp stink of scalded Qi choked the corridor. This was the deepest foundry, where raw cinnabar and volatile ores were boiled down in pits of magma. “The miasma down there strips skin in five breaths,” one disciple muttered, leaning over the balustrade. “Their meridians will pop, and their marrow will bake into the floor.” Ma Jianzhou braced himself, his body screaming with premonition. The heat was a tangible, monstrous entity, pressing in from all sides, threatening to collapse his lungs and ignite the blood in his veins. He felt the guards shove him forward, the anvil still lashed to his back. He tumbled, landing hard on a grimy, sizzling floor of solidified ash and slag. The anvil, his tormentor and his anchor, clanged against the ground, the sound swallowed by the roar of the inferno. Nie Ruhai landed cleanly on his soles, eyes scanning the swirling vortex of boiling stone and white embers. Pei Lingshuang watched from above, her cruel amusement plain. The mute smith merely stood balanced on the burning slag, an unblinking stillness settling over his shoulders. She expected screams, pleas, a desperate struggle. Ma lay wheezing on the slag, while Nie Ruhai crouched, staring into the magma pit as though inspecting a hearth. Toxic fumes and white-hot updrafts surged through the pit. Ma Jianzhou cried out, his skin blistering, his hair smoking. Charred skin peeled from his forearms in flakes. Yet, beneath the agony, something else began. The cold density in his bones intensified, hardening, resisting. Nie Ruhai sliced the hemp rope with an iron peg, letting the anvil drop upright onto the burning stone. He planted his heel against Ma's ribs, shoving the old man across the slag into a trough of pale blue fire. “Master!” Ma croaked, soot filling his mouth. The heat, instead of dissolving him, was tempering him, forcing his newly forged bones to reach an impossible, crystalline strength. Nie Ruhai’s needle-cold pressure drove the surrounding heat straight through the cracks in the old man's skin into his marrow. Meanwhile, the anvil, now free of Ma’s back, began to glow. Not with cherry red, but with an internal silver light that throbbed against the draft. The etched grooves carved into its flanks deepened and flared, drinking the ambient heat. Waves of air warped and collapsed inward, condensing the forge's thermal haze into a dense draft that sank straight into the iron block. Far above, on the arena terrace jutting over the crater lip, the sect's martial tournament was underway. Elders watched from stone benches, sipping spiced rice liquor as sect prodigies traded blows with flaming sabers. Elder Pei Lingshuang had just begun to turn away from the viewing portal to the Deep Forge, satisfied with the slow, agonizing demise of her enemies, when a gasp rippled through the stands. The sulfurous draft rising through the floor vents abruptly turned sub-zero. A needle-cold draft gusted over the terrace, extinguishing the torches and sword-glairs. The dignitaries shivered, their cultivators’ robes useless against the sudden, unnatural chill. The vents choked to a dead sputter, their runoff turning black and crusting over into crooked stone pillars. The mountain's throat had gone dark. A terrifying, absolute cold began to emanate from the Deep Forge, a chill that seeped into the marrow of every living being. Down in the depths, where Ma Jianzhou’s body had been forged anew in an inferno, he now shivered violently, not from fear, but from the sudden, profound absence of heat. The anvil, still glowing, pulsed with a frigid, internal light. And Nie Ruhai, standing over it, had raised Ma’s crude, heavy hammer. The instrument, once a simple tool of iron, now glowed with an impossible, blinding white light. Every spark of ambient heat across the entire mountain had been ripped into the hammer’s square face, packing its core with enough trapped pressure to split the caldera in two.

Forging the Geriatric Juggernaut