Chapter 1044 — Counted

CHAPTER 1044

Counted

Qin Wuyan came down the gorge wall an hour later, walking, with frost on one sleeve.

It was a thick white rime from the shoulder to the cuff, and it didn’t melt in the sun. The drivers made way for him without being told. None of them knew what he was, but none of them wanted to stand close to an old man who’d come back from that ridge alone.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said from the wagon step. “Did it fight?”

“No,” Qin Wuyan said, and brushed at the frost once. It stayed. “It stood. This one stood. Then it withdrew.”

“Then what was it doing up there?” Shi Feng asked, shifting on the step.

Qin Wuyan looked down the gorge at the body by the boulder for a long moment.

“It was counting this one,” Qin Wuyan said. “How long this one takes to come down.”

Shi Feng was troubled. The Profound Heaven enemy had tested how long Qin Wuyan could be kept away. A later attack could be planned around that delay.

“I’ll remember it too,” Shi Feng said.

Qin Wuyan nodded once and said nothing else.

The Thirteenth Elder’s ring held a few low herbs, a bone token stamped “Thirteen”, and a pill pouch. The pouch had been on his belt when the Falling Star came through him. Half the pills inside had been burned black by the stroke and the Second Anvil Fire still left in the iron.

Shi Feng tipped the whole pouch into his palm and ate the scorched ones, one after another.

“Master Shi!” Daoist Mingshu said, horrified. “Those are a bandit’s pills! And they’re burnt!”

“They still hold qi,” Shi Feng said, chewing. “My body can take it. Don’t try this yourself.”

A ruined pill still held the qi of every herb in it, and the All-Devouring Physique took that qi in whole. Heat spread out from his stomach. The bare flesh of his left arm began to tighten and close. The collarbone stopped grinding and only ached.

His wounds still hurt badly. Exhausted by the fight, Shi Feng began to run a fever despite the medicine helping his injuries.

He rode out the rest of the gorge lying on a sack of millet in the third wagon, sweating, with Mingshu walking beside the wheel and Qin Wuyan walking behind it. Du Heng kept coming back to check that he was still breathing.

“We’ll report it at the Stone Gate garrison,” Du Heng said, scratching his beard. “Thirty bandits run off and their chief killed by a passing alchemist. Is that right, Master Shi?”

“Bandits,” Shi Feng agreed from the millet. “Write it that way.”

“Bandits who can nail the sky shut,” Du Heng muttered. “What bandits these days.”

He wrote it that way anyway.

The story ran ahead of them. By the time the caravan reached the Stone Gate garrison, the soldiers there already had a version with fifty bandits. At the next waystation the teahouse had seventy, and the alchemist had killed the chief with one finger.

“One finger!” the storyteller cried, slapping his table. “The bandit’s chains fell off him like noodles!”

“Like noodles!” the crowd shouted back.

Shi Feng lay on the millet, too tired to correct the story. Daoist Mingshu looked embarrassed. Shi Feng ignored the cries and watched the wagon roof.

On the fifth day, they parted from the caravan, and on the sixth they reached Star-Reckoning Mountain.

It rose alone out of a flat grey plain, a tall black peak cut into terraces from the foot to the summit. Each terrace had its own white halls, and above the highest one a bronze tower stood open to the sky. At night, Mingshu said, every terrace lit its lamps, all the way to the top.

The fever had broken by then. Shi Feng walked up the first three hundred steps himself.

“The Mansion Master will receive you tomorrow,” Daoist Mingshu said on the fourth terrace. “Tonight you should rest. But since we’re passing the printing hall, would Master Shi like to see where his name is made?”

“I’d like to see where it’s spelled,” Shi Feng said.

The printing hall was long and warm, and it smelled of ink and cut pear wood. Forty scribes sat at low desks. Carvers worked at blocks of wood along one wall, and drying frames hung from the beams with the next issue pegged on them in rows. Nobody looked up when they came in. In this hall, a 6 Mark was just another name on a page.

Mingshu walked him slowly past the frames. There were the hundred names of the Tianxing. There was the Thousand Blossom Register for the southern kingdoms. There were lists Shi Feng had never heard of, the strongest sects, the oldest beasts, the richest houses.

On the last table lay a single proof by itself, under a paperweight shaped like a turtle.

It had only two lines.

First: Unknown.

Second: Long Caili.

Shi Feng read it once. The Twin Stars of the Empire. The second line he knew as well as anyone in Tianjing. The first line made him curious. Here, on the Mansion’s own mountain, someone might know why it still read Unknown.

Daoist Mingshu reached past him and turned the proof face down. He set the turtle back on top of it and walked on toward the door without a word.

Shi Feng didn’t ask. Mingshu didn’t explain.

“Your guest hall is on the ninth terrace,” Daoist Mingshu said at the door, bowing. “The Mansion Master asked me to tell you one thing. He’s been looking forward to meeting the man whose rank he keeps having to move.”

“Tell him I’ll try not to make him move it again,” Shi Feng said.

“He said you’d say that,” Daoist Mingshu said, smiling. “He said to tell you not to try too hard.”