Chapter 1021 — A Pill Meant to Fail

CHAPTER 1021

A Pill Meant to Fail

“Rift-Spine Root,” Mei Shuo said, and laid it on the tray. “One.”

Northwind House’s furnace room was long and low, with an iron door and one vent in the roof. Snow had piled on the vent overnight, and the room smelled of wet stone and charcoal. Thirteen of the freed alchemists sat along the back wall on rice sacks and watched the cauldron. Nobody had told them they could. Nobody had told them they couldn’t, either.

“Bone Thread Moss. Two,” Mei Shuo said, setting it beside the root. “Void Pearl, crushed. Three.”

He was a thin man of forty with burn scars on both hands. He counted every herb aloud, the way the Pit had taught him, and he didn’t seem to know he was doing it.

Shi Feng took each herb from his hand and fed it into the fire.

The Rift-Spine Pill was a 5 Mark pill. It knit a Shattering Void cultivator’s spine back together after a rift went through it, and the northern houses paid well for one. The herbs on this tray had cost about nine hundred thousand. A clean pill from them would sell for three times that.

He wasn’t going to make a clean pill.

For two days he’d felt peak Shattering Void close. His sea of qi was full to the edge and pressing against something it couldn’t yet break. A finished Rift-Spine Pill would mend a spine, and his spine was fine. What he needed was every scrap of qi in nine hundred thousand worth of herbs, in one mouthful, at the moment he chose. Only a waste pill held that, and only his body could eat one.

The Second Anvil Fire beat low under the cauldron. Nine beats and a rest. Inside, the herbs melted and ran together, and he began to fold.

One cloud stood over the furnace room roof. Then two. By the sixth, the alchemists on the rice sacks had stopped breathing loudly.

“Seven,” an old man by the door whispered. “Seven clouds, and he’s still folding.”

“Eight,” said the woman beside him. “Look. That’s eight.”

“In the Pit, Deacon Ning would have given him a cell with a window for this.”

On the last fold, Shi Feng opened his hand.

The fire didn’t go out. He simply let the fold go slack at the one place that held the pill together. The qi inside rushed into the gap, the herbs scorched black, and eight clouds broke apart over Beiling and blew away south.

A smell of burnt bone came out of the cauldron.

The room went dead quiet.

“He—he dropped it,” the old man by the door said.

“Dropped it? That was on purpose! I saw his hand!”

“Nine hundred thousand,” someone said faintly. “Gone. Just like that.”

“…”

Shi Feng lifted the lid. At the bottom lay one pill, grey and cracked, about the size of a quail’s egg. It was hot, and it was heavy for its size. It held everything.

He sealed it in a plain jade box and put the box in his sleeve, not his ring. He wanted it where his hand could find it in one movement.

Mei Shuo was staring at him.

“In the Pit they’d have broken your fingers for that,” Mei Shuo said, his voice very small.

“Then it’s good we’re not in the Pit,” Shi Feng said, and wiped the cauldron rim with his sleeve. “That pill’s for me.”

“Nobody can eat a waste pill, Master Shi,” Mei Shuo said. “Everybody knows that.”

“I know what it is,” Shi Feng said calmly. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

Mei Shuo wanted to argue, but didn’t dare. He looked down at the empty tray, frightened by what Shi Feng intended.

Tong Xian came in with the house ledger under her arm while the smoke was still clearing. Nothing in the room seemed to surprise her, including the smell.

“Master Shi,” Tong Xian said, and made a note without looking down. “You meant to do that, Master Shi? How should I enter the herbs?”

“Spent,” Shi Feng said.

“Spent,” Tong Xian agreed, and wrote it. “Lady Shen is in the front hall. She says she won’t sit down.”

Shen Yaoqing stood by the counting-room window in white with the jade lotus at her collar. Two Serene Jade patrol disciples waited at the street door. She didn’t turn around until he was three paces from her.

“My master sent me,” Shen Yaoqing said. “The elders' hall met this morning. It’ll send no one onto the ice. A guest’s summons is a guest’s own affair.”

“Is that the hall’s view or your master’s?” Shi Feng asked.

“The hall’s,” Shen Yaoqing said, and folded her hands in her sleeves. “My master thinks the hall is right. She also dislikes it. She asked me to say both.”

“Tell her I heard both,” Shi Feng said.

“There’s one more thing. It’s mine, not hers,” Shen Yaoqing said, looking at him directly. “The lake borders our patrol. If the Pavilion’s guest dies on the ice beside a Serene Jade patrol, Elder Kong will stand up in the hall and ask why the sect let him. My master will have to answer him. A dead guest would be Elder Kong’s gift. Don’t be one.”

“I won’t let him use my death against your master,” Shi Feng said. “I intend to come back.”

“Then don’t,” Shen Yaoqing said, and walked out to her patrol without another word.

Mei Shuo was waiting in the passage when he came back. He was holding the tally slate from the furnace room against his chest.

“Master Shi,” Mei Shuo said. “The boy she took. He was the youngest of us. Fifteen.” He swallowed. “He can count to three thousand without stopping. I taught him. In the Pit, if you stopped counting, you stopped being anyone.”

Shi Feng looked at him for a moment.

“Then he’s still counting,” Shi Feng said. “Good. That’s how I’ll find him.”