Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 40 The Refinement of Muscles and Tendons is Finally Complete

Deputy Director Han's titanium business card lay at the very bottom of the drawer for two whole days. Su Xinpei didn't touch it, nor did he think about it anymore. He locked the business card together with the ring left by his master, and the moment he closed the drawer, he had already mentally ended the three-day consideration period ahead of schedule—he wouldn't refuse, nor would he accept; he would respond in another way. But not now. He had more important things to do now.

After the rift crisis ended, Iron Bone Hall returned to its usual rhythm. The old elm tree in the courtyard began to shed its leaves, and Wu Xiong patched up the tattered sandbag in the corner again and again, the canvas patched upon patched, the stitches crooked like earthworms fighting. The radio was still the same old, worn-out one, the antenna half-broken and tied with wire, playing a storytelling program every afternoon without fail. Everything was exactly the same as before the rift erupted, except that Old Iron Head's left forearm was still bandaged, and Su Xinpei's increasingly heavy aura every time he stepped into the courtyard.

He began his intensive training. It wasn't Lao Tie Tou's request; it was his own decision. He applied for an extension of his annual leave from the neighborhood committee, and Aunt He simply said "I know" on the phone, her voice as calm as if she were approving a regular leave application. At the resettlement site, Lao Sun was already capable of handling things independently, and the daily monitoring of the iron mesh system was handed over to Zhou Cheng and Wang Shu, who took turns overseeing it. Su Xinpei got up at four in the morning every day, stood in his apartment for an hour practicing, and then ran to the Iron Bone Hall, training from morning till night. Wu Xiong sometimes sparred with him, and sometimes he didn't—Wu Xiong said his punches were getting heavier and hurt more than before.

The training consisted of three main parts. In the morning, there was repeated practice of the boxing stances and secret techniques. The eighteen techniques were practiced from beginning to end, then broken down into individual movements and practiced repeatedly: sleeve-dragging, silk-wrapping, hammer-flipping, and elbow-base palm strikes—each movement was practiced three hundred times. In the afternoon, there was weighted stance training and specific tendon-strengthening exercises—standing in the courtyard for two hours with old sandbags strapped to his calves, then standing for another half hour with the sandbags removed. In the evening, there was free sparring. Wu Xiong sometimes participated, sometimes he didn't. When he didn't participate, he would hit the sandbags himself, using the rune detector left by Wang Shu to calibrate the accuracy of each strike.

On the fifth day of his sustained high-intensity training, his body began to show some signals he had never experienced before. It wasn't fatigue, nor soreness, but something more subtle. While practicing Zhan Zhuang (standing meditation), he could feel the dew dripping from the sycamore leaves outside the window—not seeing, not hearing, but feeling. With his eyes closed and his breath concentrated in his lower abdomen, he could sense the weight of the water film on the leaf surface, the speed at which the dewdrops slid down the veins, and the extremely subtle vibration in the air as each drop fell. Thinking it was an illusion, he opened his eyes and looked out the window; indeed, a row of dewdrops hung on the sycamore leaves.

He continued his stance training. The sensation beneath the floor had changed. He could sense the tap water flowing in the old pipes—not hear it, the sound of the water was very faint, mostly muffled by the floor and the soil, but his soles could feel the extremely faint vibrations emanating from the pipe walls. These vibrations were completely different from the rhythm of his heartbeat, finer and denser, flowing down the pipe walls until they were stopped at a corner by a rusty valve, then diverted again. He could even feel the layer of grease Old Iron Head had left on the wooden dummy's handle—not see it, but sense it. The wooden dummy's handle had been held by Old Iron Head for decades, and a very thin layer of sebum was embedded in the wood's texture. The chemical composition of that grease had a subtle temperature difference with the dust in the air, and after mastering the basics of leatherworking, his skin sensitivity was already able to detect that temperature difference. He stood in the center of the courtyard with his eyes closed, like a node connected to its surroundings by countless extremely fine threads, each thread transmitting information.

This feeling is different from the visualization and introspection in Daoist alchemy. Master Chen's teaching of fetal breathing visualization involves looking inward, seeing the light of the charcoal in the dantian, the flow of heat in the Ren and Du meridians, and the energy map inside the body. This feeling, however, is looking outward, perceiving through the skin, bones, and fascia, directly mapping the physical information of the surrounding environment into the body. The two don't conflict—they operate on different dimensions, one inward, one outward, converging at the Guanyuan acupoint. He tried activating both perceptions simultaneously: during standing meditation, he sank the Qi into the dantian, maintaining the inward rhythm of the microcosmic orbit, while simultaneously releasing the perception of the skin and fascia, allowing subtle signals from the external environment to flow in on their own. When the two streams of information converged in the dantian, they didn't interfere with each other; instead, they reinforced each other—the internal heat made the external perception more stable, and the external feedback made the internal Qi sensation more grounded.

He noted this discovery in his notebook: the interface between the systems of traditional martial arts and alchemy has been established at the level of perception. Specific verification will be left for later.

By the seventh day of the intense training, he had practiced the boxing stance over a hundred times. It wasn't Old Iron Head's requirement—he simply couldn't control himself. Each time he finished a set of eighteen moves, he felt something was still missing, so he would start over. After finishing, he felt his shoulders weren't fully relaxed, so he did it again. After finishing, he felt his hips hadn't rotated enough, so he did it again. After finishing, he felt his breath hadn't settled properly, so he did it again. And so it went, from dusk till late at night. The sky above the courtyard changed from gray to deep blue to pitch black, and the light rail service above changed from once every ten minutes to once every half hour, and then to a freight train at dawn. Wu Xiong had long since gone home to sleep. Old Iron Head leaned back in his wicker chair, the radio off, the tea in the enamel mug cold and refilled repeatedly. He didn't call for a stop; he just watched quietly from the side.

As Su Xinpei practiced for what felt like the umpteenth time, he suddenly couldn't feel his arms anymore. It wasn't numbness, nor fatigue, but a strange emptiness—as if his arms were no longer part of his body, but rather two pieces of driftwood supported by air currents, moving on their own in the air. He no longer needed to consciously direct his arms to twist, turn, or push; the boxing stance opened up before him on its own—the opening stance, the sleeve-piercing stance, the silk-wrapping stance, the hammer-flipping stance, the closing stance—the transitions between each movement were so fluid that even he felt a sense of unfamiliarity. He was like an observer, watching his own body practice boxing under the moonlight.

Just as this sense of clarity reached its peak, the charcoal in his dantian suddenly trembled. Not heat—it was a tremor. As if something deep within his Guanyuan acupoint had been pried open, a surge of scalding heat erupted from his dantian, flowing up the Ren meridian to his chest, then up the Du meridian to the back of his head, before splitting into countless thin streams that spread along the gaps in the fascia to his limbs. In that instant, his skin opened up completely—not his pores, but his senses. He could feel the location and state of everything in the courtyard: the body temperature and breathing of Old Ironhead on the rattan chair, the stitches of every patch on the canvas of the sandbag in the corner, the spider weaving its web on the back of the elm leaf, the sound of a stray cat jumping from the trash can in the next alley, and he could even sense from the distant windows of the lower district of Ironthorn City that were lit, someone turning off the lights, someone turning over, someone sighing softly in their sleep. He looked down at his hands—the golden veins on his forearms glowed brightly in the moonlight, burning from his wrist along the extensor tendons to his elbow, then looping back along the flexor tendons, encircling his entire forearm into a complete golden ring. It wasn't decoration—it was tendon. His golden skin and jade-like veins were fully formed.

He stopped, fists clenched. Old Iron Head stood up from his rattan chair and walked over to him. He didn't speak, but pulled a small piece of iron from his pocket—not some precision alloy, just a regular industrial iron plate, about three millimeters thick, with burrs still visible on the edges from the cutting process. He handed the plate to Su Xinpei: "Tear it."

Su Xinpei took the iron plate. He pinched the edge of the plate between his thumb and forefinger, took a deep breath, and raised the heat of the charcoal in his dantian to its maximum. Then he concentrated the trembling energy from his tendon-strengthening technique at his fingertips, not to pry it down—but to tear it. He twisted his fingers in the opposite direction, and the golden muscles and jade meridians emitted an extremely subtle hum within the fascia layer. The trembling energy at his fingertips penetrated along the crystalline structure of the iron plate, disrupting the stress distribution inside the plate within seconds. The iron plate was torn off at his fingertips like a piece of dried cardboard, the break clean and smooth, without any rough edges.

Old Tie Tou took the torn piece of iron and examined the break. He nodded, stuffed the iron into his pocket, turned, and went into the storeroom. From the innermost cabinet, he retrieved something. It was an old military tactical vest, the dark gray, scuff-resistant fabric faded from washing. The patches on the shoulders and ribs were more numerous than the sandbags Wu Xiong had patched, and each patch had a different stitch—some were thick and crooked, others were fine and neat, clearly the work of a professional tailor. On the left side of the vest's chest, a tiny embroidered symbol had been embroidered; the thread was faded, but the shape was still discernible: an open door. Old Tie Tou draped the vest over Su Xinpei's shoulders. "Mastering the Tendon Refining Technique, achieving Golden Muscles and Jade Meridians. This vest was worn by your master, I wore it, and now you wear it. Don't embarrass yourself."

Su Xinpei looked down at the small door on the vest. He reached out and took it, feeling a faint warmth as his fingers touched the fabric—not the fabric's own temperature, but the traces of body heat left by the person who had worn it over decades, remembered by the fabric fibers. He put the vest over his T-shirt and zipped it up. The vest was light, but he felt heavier after putting it on. He took a deep breath, and the charcoal in his Guanyuan acupoint seemed to be rekindled by the night wind, the heat slowly circulating throughout his body. The panel silently lit up in the lower right corner of his vision—the Tendon Refining entry had jumped to the Great Perfection stage, and another line of text popped up next to it: [Skin Refining (Iron Bone Hall) Proficiency: 0/500]. He saw the worn and faded old vest on his body in the mirror and said softly, "Next, Skin Refining." Old Iron Head had already leaned back in the rattan chair, the enamel mug covering most of his face. He looked at the young man in the old vest in the moonlight in the courtyard and said nothing. The rumble of the early morning light rail rolling over the tracks could be heard outside the courtyard wall, exactly the same as yesterday.