The fifteenth day of the first lunar month was the Lantern Festival.
By old Tianjin custom, this was a day for lantern displays and sweet rice balls.
No matter how war-torn the times became, so long as people had not been driven to trade their children for food, ordinary folk had to find a little sweetness in all that bitterness.
At noon, the sun blazed overhead. Yet the rear courtyard of the Ye Residence in Crouching Ox Alley was cold and quiet, save for a dull—
Thud! Thud! The sound came again and again.
Qin Geng stood bare-chested, his muscles knotted like granite. Sweat ran down the deep groove of his spine, turning to white mist in the heat rising from his body before it could hit the ground.
Before him stood an old elm post as thick as an arm.
That knotty elm was known as the iron and stone of woods. Its grain twisted like a hopeless tangle of hemp rope; an ordinary axe would chip its edge on it.
Qin Geng drew a deep breath and gripped the earth with his toes. His great tendons quivered like bowstrings as force rose from the soles of his feet, passed through his knees and hips, climbed his spine, and gathered at a single point on his right fist.
Thump.
The punch carried no rush of wind, nor any explosive crack.
The instant his knuckles touched the post, Qin Geng forcibly drew his fierce Bright Force together at the point of contact, turning it into a spiraling force of tremendous penetration.
This time, the seemingly indestructible elm post did not burst into a shower of splinters.
A crack opened down its middle, and the post split neatly in two. The broken edges still had a few rough fibers, but compared