The transition from the "Eel’s Philosophy" to the cold reality of weaponry happened in the quietest hour of the morning. The mountain was draped in a ghostly fog that turned the pine trees into jagged silhouettes. Inside the villa’s kitchen, the air was thick with the scent of charcoal and fermented soy.
Wang Fan stood by the heavy oak table, his body humming with the residual tension of a night spent dodging ladles in the barn. He felt different—less like a man made of flesh and bone, and more like a finely tuned instrument, sensitive to the slightest shift in the room's pressure.
Uncle Feng was standing at the back of the kitchen, near a locked wooden chest that Wang Fan had never seen him open. The old man moved with a deliberate, funereal slowness. He reached into the chest and pulle
