Chương 73: Chapter 66: The Eighth Skin Tempering

Autumn reached Blackwood slowly that year. The first change appeared in the mornings, when heat no longer clung to the blackstone streets after sunrise. Shopkeepers began leaving doors open without immediately regretting it, and the herb merchants who had spent summer fighting damp air started hanging bundles beneath their eaves to dry in the cooler wind.

Grain carts became more common each week, their wheels grinding chaff into the road, while the western forest changed by degrees from deep green to scattered yellow and then to broad streaks of orange and red along the hills. Joe noticed the season mostly through training. The eighth Skin tempering had begun. This time, there were almost no obvious weaknesses left. Earlier passes had been easier to diagnose. One side reddened sooner under friction. The skin over one shoulder recovered slightly slower.

The soles tolerated pressure differently. The forearms reacted unevenly to repeated impact. By VIII, those larger discrepancies had mostly disappeared. What remained were transitions. The thin tissue near the inside of the elbows behaved differently from the thicker outside surface. The backs of the knees flexed constantly and resisted conditioning differently from the fronts. The skin along the side of the neck needed to remain soft enough for movement while still handling pressure.

Palms, fingertips, soles, eyelids, lips, scalp and joint folds all performed different jobs. Stronger could not mean making them identical. Perfect Body seemed to understand those distinctions naturally. Joe did not. At least not at first. That made VIII an exercise in restraint as much as effort.

He trained the soles one morning on the western road after three days without rain. The dirt had packed hard beneath cart traffic, though fallen leaves softened the edges beneath the trees. The forest smelled of damp bark and decaying leaves, and every few minutes a gust sent another wave of red and yellow foliage tumbling across the road. Joe walked barefoot for part of the session. Not because bare feet were somehow superior martial training. Because footwear hid information.

He carried a moderate load across his shoulders and moved over different surfaces: packed soil, flat stone, roots, leaf-covered ground. Every step created slightly different pressure across heel, arch and forefoot. Skin VIII responded where the surface lagged. Not through pain. Through subtle differences in how Blood Energy distributed. Joe slowed. Changed direction. Walked again. There. Near the outside edge of the left foot. A tiny inconsistency.

He adjusted the load, repeated the step, then stopped before the tissue became irritated. Years earlier, he might have kept going until the whole foot burned simply because more training felt productive. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. Now he knew better. He had found the problem. Grinding the entire sole for another hour would only make recovery slower. The eighth pass reinforced that lesson constantly.

Sometimes Joe spent an entire evening identifying one weak transition and performed only a few minutes of actual tempering. Other nights, the correct target was obvious and the session ended quickly. He stopped feeling guilty about that. Time spent understanding the problem was not wasted if it prevented useless training. That mentality had begun leaking into everything else he did. Medicine. Money. Guard work. People. Not always successfully. People were much harder to optimize than herbs.

The first defensive comparison came several weeks into VIII. Joe returned to the private room near the western district after sunset. Outside, Blackwood had already begun adjusting to colder evenings. Food sellers kept braziers burning beside their carts. Steam rose from soup pots. People who had spent summer complaining about heat now complained about wind. The streets smelled of smoke, roasted grain, damp leaves and animal fat. Inside the training room, Joe set up the same controlled tests he had used before.

He had become careful about the equipment. The padded weight had to hang from the same height. The release arc needed to match. The friction cloth had to be replaced before wear made comparisons meaningless. He tested both arms rather than trusting one region. If the result looked unusually good, he repeated it on another day. The eighth pass was improving. Not dramatically. Exactly as expected. The same level of mild impact that had produced visible redness at VII now produced slightly less.

The friction test lasted longer before comparable irritation appeared. Recovery shortened modestly. Joe estimated VIII was approaching perhaps one-point-nine times the defensive quality of ordinary first Completion. Not mathematically precise. Directionally convincing. Almost double. For a layer most practitioners completed once and left behind, that was an enormous result. The improvement from VII, however, was small. Joe leaned back against the wooden post. IX could be smaller still. He did not decide yet.

VIII was not finished. There was no reason to answer the next question before the current experiment ended.

The medicine business gave him another reason not to rush. Edwin's operation had become busy enough by autumn that Joe spent fewer uninterrupted evenings alone than he used to. The common nourishing packets were selling through three routes now: Edwin's own counter, several local resellers, and two caravan merchants who carried sealed lots to nearby settlements. Recovery powder moved particularly well among guards and hunters.

Even the lower-grade products had found stable buyers among poorer laborers who preferred weaker medicine to none. Expansion brought problems. New workers. More ingredient variation. More storage. More opportunities for someone to do something slightly differently because "slightly" did not look important until fifty batches later. Mira had become better at spotting those problems before they became expensive.

Joe entered the rear office one afternoon and found her sitting beside three open account books, one supplier list, and a stack of delivery slips arranged so neatly that he immediately suspected something was wrong.

"What happened?" She looked up.

"Why does something have to happen?"

"You organized everything."

"I always organize everything."

"Not like that." Mira stared at him. Then pushed one page across the desk.

"Two resellers reported the recovery powder from last week's third batch was weaker." Joe picked it up.

"How much weaker?"

"They didn't measure. One said 'a little.'""That is useless."

"I know."

"Same ingredients?"

"Supposedly."

"Workers?"

"Same team as the previous batch."

"Drying?"

"Normal." Mira waited. Joe read the production record. The answer was not obvious. That made it interesting.

"Where are the samples?" She smiled.

"I kept three."

"Good."

The samples appeared almost identical. Color. Smell. Texture. Weight. Joe tested the preparation process backward. Ingredients came from the same supplier, but not the same shipment. He found the difference near the bottom of the ledger. The marrow-root percentage remained constant by weight. Moisture content had not. One shipment had been stored near an exterior wall during two days of rain. The roots absorbed enough moisture to reduce the actual dry medicinal material in each measured portion.

The workers followed the recipe perfectly. That was the problem. Joe showed Edwin that evening. Edwin looked at the ledger, then at the roots.

"You're telling me the workers did exactly what we told them and still made the batch wrong."

"Yes." Edwin rubbed his forehead.

"I miss when mistakes were mistakes." Joe smiled.

"This is still a mistake."

"Whose?"

"Ours." Edwin looked offended. Mira laughed from the side table. Joe continued, "We defined the measurement badly. Weight assumes similar moisture. If moisture varies enough, equal weight isn't equal medicinal content."

"So what do you want?"

"Dryness check before weighing. Or adjust preparation if the material arrives damp." Edwin sighed.

"Another step."

"One small step."

"Every improvement you make creates paperwork."

"That means the improvement survived me." Edwin paused. Joe continued, "If the process only exists in my head, it disappears when I leave the room." Mira looked at him. Something in her expression changed slightly at the word leave. Joe noticed. He did not address it. Not yet. Edwin eventually nodded.

"Add the check." Joe did.