Chapter 1006 — Nine Clouds Under Snow

CHAPTER 1006

Nine Clouds Under Snow

The furnace hall of Iron Glacier Hold had a roof of packed snow.

The Helian used snow to hold heat in while letting smoke escape. On still days the roof steamed. That morning four or five hundred clan members, from warriors to children and old women in fur, watched silently from the courtyard walls through the hall’s open sides.

Shi Feng lit the Hold’s great bronze cauldron with the Thousand Forge Flame and laid out the herbs on a slab of black stone. Seam-Binding Silk Moss. Void Spar dust. Nine-Bend Glacier Root, cut at every bend. White Marrow Lichen from the Helian’s own cliffs, which Helian Tieshan had sent men up the ice for at midnight.

“Second Anvil Fire?” Helian Ba asked from the side, very quietly for once.

“Not yet,” Shi Feng said. “First the root has to melt slowly. If I hurry it, it splits.”

He fed in each herb. Qin Wuyan stood at the hall’s doorway with his hands in his sleeves, and on the walls the Helian watched an alchemist work for an hour without anything happening at all.

“Is he doing anything?” a child asked loudly.

“Hush,” the child’s grandmother said. “An iron rod is ground into a needle one day at a time.”

By noon the herbs had become a pale grey liquid, turning slowly in the bottom of the cauldron. Shi Feng put both palms on the bronze and struck the Second Anvil Fire.

Clang!

The cauldron rang. The snow on the roof shivered.

He beat it nine times and rested. Nine times and rested. Each count drove the liquid tighter, and on the third count it began to draw itself into a ball. Above the cauldron, the first cloud appeared.

It was a small white cloud, the size of a sheep. A second one came beside it. Then a third.

“Clouds!” someone shouted on the walls. “Three clouds!”

“That’s a pass! Three’s a pass, isn’t it?”

“Four! There’s four now!”

At the sixth cloud, Shi Feng stopped beating. He reached up with his Spirit Sense, took hold of the first cloud and pulled it down into the cauldron.

The walls went silent.

Clouds over a furnace showed how good a pill was going to be. Nobody pulled them into the furnace. But a cloud over a forming pill was a fold of the pill’s own qi, pushed out into the air. Pull it back in, and the pill had a fold inside it. That was the whole trick. A seam in space could only be closed by something that knew how to fold.

He pulled the second cloud in. The third.

Each one was harder. Each one fought him, and each one he had to hold apart from the others inside the cauldron, so they didn’t merge into one. His palms burned against the bronze. Sweat ran down his back under the robe. At the sixth, the cauldron began to hum on its own.

Seventh. Eighth.

“How many is he going to put in?” Helian Ba whispered.

“Nine,” Qin Wuyan said from the door.

The ninth cloud came down into the cauldron, and Shi Feng held nine folds apart at once inside the bronze, the way he had at his sitting in Tianjing. For ten breaths he held every fold apart. Shi Feng didn’t relax until the cauldron gave a final soft ring. The humming stopped, and he knew the pill had formed.

He lifted the lid. One pill lay at the bottom, pale grey, with nine faint white lines wound round it.

He carried it to the side room himself and put it into Helian Dun’s mouth.

The black seam on Helian Dun’s side shivered. Then it began to close from both ends at once, slowly, a finger’s width at a time. The grey flesh on either side turned dark, then red, then pink. Helian Dun arched off the bed and roared, and on the walls outside, the whole clan heard him.

When the seam had closed, there was a thin pink scar across his side and nothing else.

“It itches,” Helian Dun said, astonished. “It actually itches!”

“That’s healing,” Shi Feng said. “Don’t scratch it.”

The clan on the walls began to shout, and didn’t stop for a long time.

Helian Tieshan paid in the great hall that afternoon, two million in stone notes on the table, counted out by his own hand. Shi Feng counted them again.

Then Helian Tieshan stood up, put his fists together, and bowed.

The clan master bowed first, in his own hall, to a guest a quarter his age. It was an open acknowledgement of gratitude before the whole clan. The Helian elders gasped. Helian Ba’s mouth fell open.

“The Helian owe you a life, Master Shi,” Helian Tieshan said. “We don’t forget those.”

“I’m glad I could help, Clan Master Helian,” Shi Feng said, returning the bow more deeply. “Your family trusted me with him. That matters too.”

Helian Ba walked him out to the guest house at dusk. His face had gone serious again.

“Our scouts say the man who struck my uncle is still in our hills,” Helian Ba said. “A grey robe. He walks alone and leaves no tracks. They’ve seen him twice near Bitter Wind Gorge.”

“Then he’s waiting for something,” Shi Feng said.

They found out what that night.

It came at midnight. A pressure settled over the caravan road east of the Hold, heavy and cold, so heavy the dogs in the kennels lay flat and whimpered. Every Helian warrior on the walls felt it. Most of them sat down.

Profound Heaven.

It didn’t move. It didn’t strike. It just stayed there over the road, waiting to see who would come out to meet it.

Qin Wuyan stood up from his chair by the guest house door. He looked east for a long moment. Then he looked at Shi Feng.

“Stay inside the walls,” Qin Wuyan said.

He was gone before the words finished.