Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 16 The Edge of the Crack

The orange alert from the Special Election Bureau arrived on the afternoon of the second Wednesday of November.

Su Xinpei had just finished a follow-up visit to residents around Beihe No. 2 Primary School. As he turned a corner at the alley entrance, pushing his bicycle, his old-fashioned cell phone vibrated twice in his pocket. He leaned his bike against the wall, opened the phone, and saw a text message on the screen. The sender was a string of random thirteen digits—an encrypted short number. The message contained only two lines: "Checkpoints have been set up around the abandoned factory area of ​​Beihe. Starting tomorrow, residents are not allowed to approach. Please cooperate in explaining this to the residents. Ye." There was no heading, no signature.

He read the text message twice, closed his phone, and rode his bike towards the neighborhood office. The Beihe Abandoned Factory Area—the old industrial site next to the agricultural machinery factory last year—covered approximately four standard city blocks. It had gradually ceased production seven years ago and was cleared out even before the agricultural machinery factory. He had seen the area's number on a topographic map in the archives last month, but at that time the focus was on the agricultural machinery factory and Beihe No. 2 Primary School; the factory area was merely marked with a gray circle. Now the gray circle had turned orange.

Back at the street office, he locked his bicycle to the back gate railing, went upstairs, and pushed open the office door. Aunt He was standing next to the photocopier, organizing meeting materials to be distributed that afternoon. Seeing him come in, she pulled a document from the pile of papers and placed it on his desk. "The Special Meteorological Bureau sent it this afternoon; I signed it on your behalf." Su Xinpei looked down at the document. The cover was printed with the full name of the Special Meteorological Bureau's Iron Thorn Branch and its closed-eye logo. The security classification was marked "Internal," and the title was "Notification Regarding the Early Warning and Peripheral Control of Abnormal Activities in the Beihe Abandoned Industrial Zone." He opened the document. The main text was four pages long, and the core content was simple: the Special Meteorological Bureau had detected intermittent crack activity in the Beihe abandoned factory area, with both frequency and intensity showing an upward trend, exceeding the threshold of normal environmental fluctuations. The crack activity was mainly concentrated at night, and no physical overflow had been detected yet, but monitoring data showed that the crack had the potential to expand steadily. To prevent accidents, the military had set up checkpoints around the factory area and dispatched two teams of biochemical warfare soldiers to take turns guarding it. The official explanation was "cleaning up hazardous materials left over from industrial sources." The subdistrict office's cooperation includes: notifying nearby residents not to approach, cooperating in evacuation preparations, and assisting in calming residents' emotions.

Intermittent crack activity. Su Xinpei closed the file and leaned back in his chair. He had seen this term in last year's abnormal complaint files—one complainant described "brief bending of the corridor wall," which the clerk at the time wrote "suspected intermittent crack activity" in the assessment column, and then returned it to the street office for filing on the grounds of "no continuous abnormality." Now this term appeared in the Special Bureau's official notification, indicating that what was underground in the factory area had become active enough to be continuously detected by instruments.

He locked the documents in a drawer and began calling the affected residents. The calls lasted nearly an hour. Some asked what the cracks were, others asked if they should move out early, and one person remained silent for a long time before saying, "I haven't slept well for days." Su Xinpei patiently repeated the notification: the cleanup of industrial chemical residues might produce odors and noise. He heard himself speak calmly and politely—exactly the same "please wait patiently" and "we have urged the relevant authorities" he had said countless times over the past three years. But he knew this time was different. This wasn't an excuse, not a delay; the authorities had genuinely sent two teams of bio-weapons, and the Special Affairs Bureau's field team had already deployed defenses at some unknown coordinate. And the residential buildings he passed every day on his way home, with their lights on, were only two alleys away from the nearest building in the defense zone.

He arrived at Tiegutang at dusk, half an hour later than usual. When he pushed open the gate to the courtyard, Old Tietou was squatting in the corner sewing a rope around a new sandbag. Wu Xiong wasn't there; the only sound in the courtyard was a radio playing a legal consultation program, the host answering a listener's question about a labor contract dispute, the volume fluctuating. Su Xinpei hung his coat on an old nail, moved a basin of ice water and an infrared lamp from the storage room door, and prepared for his usual skin-refining training. He took off his shoes and socks and stepped into the ice water; the water was above his ankles. The chill immediately shot up from his Yongquan acupoint. The memory of his standing meditation automatically took over his breathing rhythm, the cold being blocked by his skin, while the heat inside his abdomen steadily rose.

Half an hour later, he emerged from the ice water and sat in front of the infrared lamp. The lamplight made his back red, and his skin turned from pale to flushed. The panel changed—his leatherworking experience points had moved forward slightly. He wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a towel. Old Ironhead put down his work, walked to the bench, picked up his enamel mug, took a sip, and said, "You know about what happened in the factory area."

This is not a question. Su Xinpei nodded.

"Don't go back tonight. Pack your things and come with me to look at some things." Old Tie Tou poured out the water in his hand, the enamel mug clinking crisply on the bench. Su Xinpei glanced at him—the old man didn't smile, nor did he have his usual "to put it bluntly, that's a compliment" expression. He added, "Remember: just look, don't touch."

Su Xinpei didn't ask where he was going. He unplugged the infrared light, emptied the basin of ice water in the corner, put on his shoes and socks, and zipped up his coat. Old Tie Tou took a flashlight from inside the house, tested the switch, and rummaged through the storage room for a pair of old military boots for Su Xinpei to change into. "The soles are non-slip," he said, "the road we're walking on isn't for the municipal administration to repair." Then he pulled an old military jacket from the closet, put it over his vest, stuffed the flask into the inside pocket, and went out first through the gate.

The two walked one after the other through North First Alley, bypassed the back entrance of the vegetable market, and slipped through the ruins of the slated-for-demolition tenement buildings on the east side of the old district. The ground was covered with broken bricks and bent steel bars, and the air was thick with the musty stench of coal dust mixed with waste engine oil. The elevated railway tracks of the central urban area overhead blocked out only a sliver of sunlight. Su Xinpei followed Lao Tietou, turning several times between the broken walls, and finally stopped in front of a half-collapsed fire door. Lao Tietou used his toes to push open the door, revealing a set of steps leading downwards, covered with water stains and dried mud.

"This is the entrance to the old factory's sewer network. The military has blocked off four main roads above it, but no one has blocked the sewers—not because they forgot, but because they're not familiar with the area."

They descended the steps. There were no lights in the sewers; the concrete walls on either side were covered in dried moss and rust. Occasionally, water droplets seeped from the pipes overhead, their sound amplified by the pipes. Su Xinpei followed behind Lao Tietou, his shoes slipping on the wet brick surface, but he always managed to regain his balance using the stance training he had developed. After about ten minutes, Lao Tietou stopped and turned off his flashlight. At the end of the sewer was a half-open iron fence, beyond which lay the underground utility tunnel of the factory area. Lao Tietou squeezed through the gap in the fence, and Su Xinpei followed, his work badge scraping against the fence with a harsh metallic scraping sound.

The utility tunnel was very tall and pitch black, but at its far end, a faint light flickered—not from a lamp, but from purple. Su Xinpei stopped at the tunnel's exit, using the dim purple light to make out the space before him: it was the main workshop of an abandoned factory, its dome about four stories high, the steel beams of the ceiling rusted almost black, and the floor littered with rusted machine tools and collapsed conveyor belts. He was standing on an old loading platform, its concrete base extending from the tunnel's exit into the heart of the workshop, less than fifteen meters from the crack suspended in the air in the center of the workshop.

A crack. A crack visible to the naked eye. About two meters long, wide enough to fit a fist at its widest point, suspended about three meters above the ground. It wasn't torn in a wall, nor cracked in a pipe—it simply floated there in mid-air, like someone had smashed a piece of glass and left the cracks in the air. A dim purple light emanated from within the crack, neither flickering nor flowing, coldly reflecting the mottled old slogans on the east wall of the workshop. Su Xinpei stared at the crack for a while before noticing that it wasn't completely still—the air at the edge of the crack was undulating extremely slowly, like looking at a distant view through a heatwave. This was the same "feeling" he had seen in the corridor of the old Beihe district—the rules of the material boundaries were being repeatedly stretched by some force, only this time the amplitude was greater, more stable, and more persistent.

Su Xinpei instinctively pressed his back against the iron door of the utility tunnel exit. The coolness of the metal seeped through the soles of his old military boots, and he could even feel the pulsation in the Yongquan acupoint on the soles of his feet and the warmth circulating throughout his body, all simultaneously reminding him that his body had entered a state of high alert. It wasn't fear, but the tiny bit of sensory awareness he had honed through repeated exposure to ice water basins and infrared lights was desperately pushing any abnormal signals from the surrounding environment into his brain. There was a very faint smell in the air, not the pungent smell of chemicals, but more like the ozone smell that rises from the earth before a storm, only it felt more enclosed and heavy in this abandoned workshop.

"See it clearly?" Old Ironhead lowered his voice. "This is a crack. The kind that can tear a building in half. It's still very thin now, but it will expand at night. The military has set up a defense line on the other side during the day, and they've also deployed bio-warriors. Conventional weapons can't penetrate it, but they can keep it within a range that won't expand—provided that they don't alert what's inside."

"What's inside?"

"The person in the mirror is small. There's something even bigger—the 'Mirror Lord,' as large as a cart, capable of actively distorting the surrounding space. But this rift hasn't shown any signs of solidity overflowing yet, indicating it's still developing. Once it matures, it will shatter the entire space it occupies overnight."

Old Tie Tou tucked his flashlight under his arm and drew a line on the ground with his finger. "The military has set up checkpoints around the factory area, with two squads of bio-warriors rotating shifts. Their standard containment method is to treat the crack as a 'geological disaster'—setting up monitoring zones around it, cutting off all access, and removing the entire area from the map. This plan can stop ordinary people without a problem, but remember: the crack is not a geological disaster. If you leave it in a long-term, semi-dormant state, with no substance emerging from inside and no fluctuation in the air pressure outside, it can slowly erode the surrounding area when it's quietest."

Su Xinpei recalled the description "no entity spillover detected" in the Special Meteorological Bureau's notification he'd seen earlier that day. "Nothing detected yet." This phrase followed the same pattern as "no obvious abnormalities" in the agricultural machinery factory's files last year—it didn't mean there were no problems, but rather that the conditions for emergency intervention were temporarily not met. And conditions always change at the worst possible time; he'd seen too many examples like this in the archives: landslide warnings were submitted two days before the rainstorm, but evacuation wasn't initiated until the rainstorm had washed away the retaining wall.

He tilted his head slightly, momentarily shifting his gaze from the crack, and noticed that the water on the ground at the base of the east wall of the workshop appeared pale purple in the reflection. This color was very similar to the film-like sheen he had seen inside the cracks in the bungalow area, but deeper and more concentrated, as if the entire workshop was being slowly permeated by some substance seeping from the cracks. He kept this discovery to himself, without asking further questions.

Old Tietou zipped up his jacket half an inch and turned to look at Su Xinpei. The purple light behind him cast a blurry outline on the side of his face. "I brought you here tonight so you could see this door with your own eyes. You've been practicing standing meditation, strengthening your tendons and skin for the past six months, so you've built a foundation. But if you've never even seen what a crack looks like, you won't know how to seal it later." He shoved a flashlight into Su Xinpei's hand. "Look enough and then leave. Nobody's going to catch the subway for you."

Holding the flashlight, Su Xinpei continued to stare at the air surface at the edge of the crack, which rippled slightly like a heat wave. He couldn't say how long he stared, maybe seven or eight minutes, perhaps ten. The crack didn't expand, nor did it make any sound; it simply hung there, coldly glowing with purple light. But Su Xinpei noticed something he hadn't read about in the files: the crease on his left rib—the old silver-gray line he'd discovered during his last shower—began to itch slightly under the purple light. It wasn't painful, but a low-intensity, continuous itch, completely opposite to the feeling of his blood and qi being restored during his standing meditation that day. Last time it felt like it was pulling inward; this time it felt like something was pulling it outward, as if the lingering memory of the crease was resonating extremely faintly with something inside the crack at the same frequency. He pressed his palm against his left rib, and the itching lessened somewhat under the warmth of his palm, but didn't completely disappear.

He turned off the flashlight. "Let's go."

The return journey took twice as long as the outward one. Old Tie Tou walked slowly, stopping at each fork in the road to listen intently. By the time they emerged from the sewers, it was late at night, the Ironthorn City night sky above them bathed in a dim orange glow from the city center's lights. Old Tie Tou tossed his non-slip military boots by the storage room door, while Su Xinpei changed back into his own shoes, smoothing the rough edges of his work ID card scraped from the fence with his fingernail. The two stood in the yard, neither speaking.

"The mirror is over here, and something inside is watching you in its reflection. When you reach the final stage of skin tempering, there will be a 'residual sense of the mirror' on your skin—you can sense the frequency changes it transmits before it gets close. But when you covered your left rib just now, your palm was warm, which means you were still using the heat from your dantian to cover its frequency. That's not enough." Old Tie turned on the tap, splashed cold water on his face, then took out a cigarette from his pocket, put it in his mouth without lighting it. With his back to Su Xinpei, he finished his last sentence: "Next time in the skin tempering class, soak in ice water followed by qi cultivation and breathing exercises. Use qi gathering to stretch the skin, not to force the skin against its frequency."

Su Xinpei nodded. It was almost 2 a.m. when he returned to his apartment. After showering, he put his clothes in the washing machine, sat on the edge of the bed, and opened his notepad. Next to "Introduction to Skin Refining," he added a new detail on tempering techniques: Qi regulation combined with alternating hot and cold temperatures—using Qi to guide the skin's frequency. Then, on a new page, he wrote a few short lines:

I saw the crack with my own eyes tonight. Not in a photo, not in a file description. It was breathing. My crack was reacting. My scalper said my skin is still too tender to control its frequency. If the crack expands, the Special Operations Bureau's field team leader will need someone with experience in traditional martial arts to assist. I might not be chosen, but I can't afford to be unprepared.

He closed the notebook and turned off the light. In the darkness, the itch on his left side was no longer there. But the feeling of being gently pulled outward by something still lingered on his skin, like an invisible suction force passing through the one-way transparent membrane of the factory workshop, sitting quietly opposite him in the same room.