It took Qian Xiaotian eight days to stop tasting blood.
Qian Wudi’s palms had done to his organs what they had never managed to do to the outside. Iron Hide had kept his skin whole and his ribs in one piece, and underneath it, something had been shaken loose, the way a bell can ring itself cracked. For the first three days he coughed red into the straw of the stables where nobody could see. For the next five, he carried water anyway, slowly, and breathed the way the clan’s manual had taught him, in and down, and sent out the qi along the widened roads of Iron Hide to the places that hurt, and let it sit there, and waited.
By the ninth morning, the iron taste was gone, and the installment was due in six days, and he had a hundred and ninety coppers put by.
The bounty that nobody wanted was nailed to the post just outside of the eastern gate, below the ones that were usually taken up by the clan youths and the rogue cultivators.
GRAY-HIDE BOAR — EAST FIELDS
Raiding the millet terraces past the ditch.
Tusks to the gate inspector: 60 coppers.
The farmer adds 20.
Body Tempering Realm 6th layer and above only.
The hunting teams had read it and walked past it for a week. The pay was too small for too much trouble. Qian Xiaotian read it twice and took it down.
“That one’s near the old wood,” said the eastern gate inspector when Qian Xiaotian handed him the paper. He was a thin man with a pipe, and he said it in a way that made you feel you shouldn’t ask any more questions.
“The terraces are this side of the ditch,” said Qian Xiaotian.
“The boar’s not.” The inspector took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at him properly, perhaps for the first time. “Back before dusk, you hear me? Tusks or no tusks. Make sure to come back before dusk.”
Xiaotian nodded, because he felt like it was better than asking why.
* * *
He had four things with him: a length of ash wood as long as his arm, which he had cut himself to look like a makeshift wooden pole and hardened over the kiln fire; a coil of old rope; a handful of Cracked Millet, bought the same morning from the vegetable cart for one copper; and the cloth bag his mother used for radishes, for the tusks.
He did not have a knife. Knives cost money.
He did not bring his father’s wooden sword either. That stayed on the shelf at home, where nothing could happen to it. That’s why he had to make do with a makeshift wooden pole.
The east fields ran out from the wall in long green steps of millet, terrace below terrace, down toward an irrigation ditch as wide as a man was tall. Past the ditch there was a strip of rough grass, and past the grass there was the old wood.
It didn’t look like much. A long, low line of trees with gray trunks and dark crowns, too even, too still. No birds went in or came out. From the terraces it looked less like a forest than like a wall somebody had grown.
Everyone in Wutong city called it the old wood. It had another name, an older one, that nobody really liked to say, especially after dark, due to its eeriness; that was the name that only grandmothers and their ancestors said when they wanted the children to go to sleep, and as a horror story to make them stay out of the woods.
He did not look at it for long. The task wasn’t to sightsee and admire an eerie forest, but to hunt boars.
The boar’s work was everywhere. Whole rows of millet were flattened and rooted up, the soil turned in wide, careless furrows. At the bottom terrace, where the ground was soft, tracks of the boar could be seen. Split hooves, each one as wide as a palm. Deep. A heavy animal, and not a young one at that.
Gray-hide boars were spirit beasts, not merely pigs. The rogue cultivators who hunted outside the city walls said a grown one weighed as much as three men, ran faster than a horse over a short distance, and had a hide like wet leather over stone. None of that worried Qian Xiaotian very much, though.
What worried him were the tusks.
The Iron Hide technique spreads the blow throughout your body. That was the appeal of it: to strengthen your body as hard as iron; whatever blow your body gets, it will spread out along the roads that it has widened and share the burden across your body until no one part has to carry it alone. But a blow from the tusk was different; it didn’t merely land on the body; it went in. It pierced it. It put all the force into one point, faster than any road could carry it away. Without sufficient caution, Qian Xiaotian would turn into a wooden board struck with a gigantic sharp nail.
He found the place he wanted at the edge of the bottom terrace, where the bank dropped a body’s length into the ditch. He laid a line of millet along the lip of the bank, right at the edge. Then he stepped back into the standing millet a few paces uphill, sank into Weighing-Scale Stance with the ash stick across his knees, and patiently waited.
The sun went down in the sky.
His thighs burned. He let them. Eighty coppers. With the hundred and ninety already put by, and a week of rat nights, he could pay early again, and every copper paid early counted for more than a copper. The deal was a lifesaver.
The light went orange, then red.
Back before dusk, the inspector said. Xiaotian looked at the sun and at the millet line, and did not move.
* * *
It came out of the grass on the far side of the ditch, and it was bigger than its tracks had suggested.
Gray, heavy, the color of a riverbank in winter, with a ridge of bristles down its back that stood up like a row of knives when it caught his scent. It stopped at the far bank and looked across the ditch at the millet, and then at the terraces, and then, for a long moment, at the place where he was standing among the stalks, not breathing.
Its tusks were as long as his forearm. They curved up and out, yellow at the root and white at the points, and there was dried blood on one of them, but from whom it was, none can say.
It went down into the ditch, tried to climb back up in two scrambling bounds with unbridled desperation, and put its snout to the millet line.
Qian Xiaotian let it eat.
He counted. It ate along the line toward the edge of the bank, head down, the way he had watched the rats do in the granary: bolder with every mouthful it consumed, because nothing had happened yet, and nothing happening was the most persuasive thing in the world for the boar. It had let its guard down.
When it finally reached the last of the millet, right at the lip of the drop, Xiaotian moved.
Steelyard Sword, the first cut. The ash stick came around low and flat and struck the boar’s front leg just above the hoof, where the hide was the thinnest, with all the weight of his settled stance behind it. It was a cut that was meant to go through a man’s shin. Alas, it was not a man but a boar.
The strike from the wooden pole did not go through the boar.
The stick jumped in his hands like it was alive; the shock ran up both his arms to the shoulder, and the boar screamed, a sound like iron dragged across the stone, and turned on him faster than anything that size had any right to turn.
He did not run. You couldn’t outrun a boar. You could only show it your back and wish that it suddenly decided not to pursue you anymore.
He turned his hip instead, the way the stance was taught, and the boar’s shoulder hit him full in the side.
The gray came up through his skin like frost on a pond. The blow went into him and out, down his legs, into the soft earth of the terrace, and his heels plowed two long furrows through the millet. It was like being hit by a wagon; Qian Xiaotian spat blood from his mouth.
He continued to stay on his feet.
The boar swung its head.
He saw the tusk coming; Iron was many things; unfortunately, being quick was not one of them. The tusk went into his thigh just above the knee.
It didn’t matter that his skin had gone gray. It didn’t matter that his muscle was as dense as an iron bar. The tusks still stabbed and went into his thigh: all that weight behind one sharp blow, faster than any iron body could dissipate. He felt it stop against the bone. He felt the boar beginning to lift him up into the air with pure strength.
If he was lifted, it would surely open his leg from the knee to the hip, and he would bleed out on a millet terrace for merely eighty coppers.
Qian Xiaotian began to act without thinking. He dropped the wooden pole.
He put both of his hands on the boar’s head, one on each side of the tusk, and instead of pulling away, he sank deeper. Weighing-Scale Stance, the lowest he had ever held it, his whole weight and the whole of Iron Hide poured down into his heels, so that the boar wasn’t trying to lift a boy but an iron statue driven into the ground.
For one long moment, nothing moved at all.
Then the boar’s hind hooves, braced at the very edge of the bank where the millet had been, went out from under it.
The soft lip crumbled. The boar lurched backward, the tusk tore free of his thigh with a sound he would hear for a week, and for a heartbeat three men’s weight of spirit beast hung at the edge of the drop with its front legs scrambling at the terrace and its head, for the first time, below his.
He raised his right hand, flat, the edge turned outward, and brought it down onto the boar’s nape, just right behind the skull.
Metal cuts.
The boar went over the edge and into the ditch; blood showered down from its neck into the water, flowing through the irrigation canal.
* * *
He sat in the flattened millet for a while with his hands pressed over his thigh and the blood coming up between his fingers, and calculated, because calculating was easier than looking at the leg overflowing with his blood.
The tusk had gone in a finger’s depth and stopped at the bone. The bone had held. Iron Hide had not saved him from getting stabbed, but it had saved him from getting lifted up and tearing his whole leg, and that was the difference between being able to walk home and not.
He tore the radish bag in half and tied the leg with one half. He kept the other for the tusks.
Down in the ditch, getting them out took longer than killing the boar had. He had no knife, and in the end he did it with the edge of his hand, patiently, the way he did everything else, which is one step at a time, while the light went from red to purple and the shadows of the trees across the ditch grew long and joined together into one shadow.
When he harvested the tusks, he looked at the rest of the boar and did some thinking.
The butcher by the eastern gate paid well for spirit-beast meat, because it was dense with wild qi and half the hunting teams’ families lived on it. And fighting the boar made him hungry since he expended so much energy with the Iron Hide technique. Not hungry the way he had been hungry for the last few years, which was a thing he no longer noticed, but a new hunger, deep in the bones, as if his body had been built out of iron and now wanted feeding like a forge.
Half for the butcher, half for the pot. He still had enough for leftovers for his mother.
He was trying to work out how to take a leg off a spirit beast without any knives when he heard them.
Four rogue cultivators, coming along the ditch path from the south: no clan robes, no sect badges, just leather and scars and a gray wolf’s head stitched on every shoulder that marked their affiliation. Their bows were unstrung and as thick as a boy’s wrist, bows no ordinary arm could have drawn, and the string of hares between them were spirit hares, each the size of a dog. They walked fast, without even disturbing the grass, moving smoothly. They slowed when they saw the boy, and the blood, and the boar in the water.
The oldest of them, a gray-bearded man with a scar through one eyebrow, looked at the boar for a long time. Then at the tusks in the bloody radish bag. Then at the boy.
Qian Xiaotian could feel him from five paces away: the dense, settled weight of a Body Tempering realm cultivator all the way to the peak of the 9th layer and stopped there, the way a river stops at a dam.
“The bounty in the eastern gate, huh,” he said. “The one we didn’t feel like taking.”
“Yes, uncle.”
The old rogue looked at the ditch, and the crumbled lip of the bank, and the millet line, and something in his face changed.
“You baited it to the edge,” he said. “And you also didn’t chase it. Quite a smart move there.”
“Chasing it would cost me my ankles,” said Qian Xiaotian.
One of the younger ones laughed out loud. The old man didn’t. He only nodded, slowly, the way you nod at a man who has told you an absurd price and said that it was just fair.
“You’ll want to be back through the gate, kid,” he said. “Now. Leave the rest of the meat. We’ll bring it up for you.”
“I can carry—”
“Now,” said the old man, with a voice that expects not to repeat itself. He was not looking at Xiaotian anymore. He was looking at the sun, which was touching the tops of the trees on the far side of the ditch.
Then, as if reciting something he had been taught before he could walk: “Never be on the eastern ditch when the light goes out. That’s the rule, boy. It will do you better to follow the rule if you want to live long.”
Qian Xiaotian picked up the ash stick and the bag and began to climb.
He was three terraces up when he heard it.
It came from the old wood, from somewhere deep among the gray trunks, and it was a sound he had no word for. The nearest he could come up with a description for it was a bell. A great bronze temple bell, struck once, very far away, and heard even through deep water: not ringing so much as swelling, slow and round and muffled, a sound that seemed to arrive through the soles of his feet as much as his ears.
It went on for a long time. Then it stopped.
Qian Xiaotian turned around.
Below him, the four gray wolves were lashing the boar’s carcass to a pole with quick, practiced hands, heads down, backs to the wood.
Not one of them had looked up.