It rained heavily, and the stagnant water in Qingshi Alley reflected the oil-paper umbrellas swinging under the eaves. I clutched the broken "Bone Forging Sutra" and ran my fingertips over the raised lines on the cover - they were clearly the knuckle bones of some kind of animal, causing a fine pain in the palm of my hand.
Three months ago, I rescued an old man who was dying in a mass grave in the west of the city. He gasped like a broken bellows in his throat, clutching the book with his withered hands, and stared at the broken knife on my waist with his cloudy eyes: "If you want to learn how to live forever... Grind your bones..." Before he finished speaking, his skin suddenly shriveled up at a speed visible to the naked eye, and finally turned into a mummy covered with black lines.
At first I just thought it was crazy. Until one full-moon night, I accidentally opened the scroll, and the ink on the yellowed pages actually swam like a living creature, pieced together with twisted words: "Bone is like a solid stone, and life is as long as the mountains and rivers. The more flesh and blood are damaged, the stronger the muscles and bones." According to the scripture, I started to scrape my knuckles with a dull knife. At first there was just blood oozing, and later the white bones were exposed, but the wound healed faster and faster, and the new skin had a faint sapphire-like luster.
Weird rumors began to spread in the city. Some people said they heard the sound of metal scraping from the martial arts studio late at night, as if someone was constantly polishing something; others said they saw a masked warrior wielding a knife in the moonlight, and the blade would reflect the cold light of the bone cross section. I knew that was me, but every time after practicing, I felt an uncontrollable hunger in my chest, as if something was gnawing at my internal organs.
