Shen Mu is a blacksmith.
While others practice martial arts, he forges iron. The iron he works is his own body.
On the night the 317 members of the Boneforge Hall were wiped out, his father sealed a furnace of cold into his bones and left him half a hammerhead. Treat the cold like iron and hammer it for a day, and you'll live another day.
He has hammered away for twenty years.
The cold sinks into his bones, and steel grows within them. Not one of the hundred names on the Martial Ranking is a blacksmith; not one of the three hundred weapons on the Weapon Ranking was made with his hammer. He intends to claim a place on both.
But the waters of the capital run deeper than vengeance. Someone has spent twenty years forcing the finest craftsmen in the realm to forge iron underground. Someone holds a jade disc and means to burn the Nine Provinces like a furnace. And someone else gave their life to leave behind a page of blood-written words: Bones must never be forged.
Why must they never be forged? What, exactly, can be forged from bone?
Shen Mu swings his hammer in a full arc. When the furnace fire reaches its peak, he will see what lies at the end of these bones, and whether the thing standing there is human, or something else entirely.
The pace is quite fast.