Chapter 1045 — The Mansion's Coin

CHAPTER 1045

The Mansion's Coin

Mansion Master Taishi Xu had a round face and belly, and a broad smile.

He received Shi Feng on the twelfth terrace, in an open hall with a low tea table. No guards or disciples attended. He rose when the guest came in and bowed first, deeply, with his hands together. A Profound Heaven Mansion Master bowing first to a peak Shattering Void guest was the full courtesy a 6 Mark was owed, and he gave it as if it cost him nothing.

Qin Wuyan stood outside the door. Taishi Xu bowed to him too.

“Master Shi,” Taishi Xu said warmly, pouring. “Sit, sit. You came through Nine-Bend. The rains up there come early this year, don’t they? The road turns to soup.”

“It was dry,” Shi Feng said, and sat. “Someone nailed it shut.”

“Ah, the nails,” Taishi Xu said, nodding sadly. “Bandits are so inventive lately. Have you tried our mountain cloud tea? It grows on the north face. It only gets two hours of sun a day, so it’s very bitter. People pay a great deal for bitterness up here.”

Taishi Xu talked about tea, the plain’s weather, and this year’s snow lotus prices north of Frost Pass. He spoke at length about the lotus. He discussed frost moss and three pine resins, pouring every cup himself.

Shi Feng answered every question and asked none. He’d come a long way to ask one thing. He could wait one pot of tea.

The pot ran dry. Taishi Xu looked into it, a little sorry.

“Well,” Taishi Xu said, and folded his hands on his belly. “Master Shi didn’t climb three thousand steps for my tea. Ask.”

“Two readings,” Shi Feng said. “One for a woman of the Serene Jade Sect. She carried me out of the rain once and I owe her. I want to know what stands in her way. The second for my mother. She left the frontier twenty-one years ago. I have nothing of hers but a hairpin.”

Taishi Xu’s cup stopped halfway to his mouth for half a breath. Then it went on, and he drank the last cold mouthful, and his smile didn’t change at all.

“A Serene Jade woman,” Taishi Xu said mildly. “And a mother from the frontier. You don’t ask small things, Master Shi.”

“Small things I could have asked by letter,” Shi Feng said.

“No, no. Clearly not,” Taishi Xu said, setting down his cup. “The Mansion doesn’t refuse either of them. But the Mansion is a house of trade, and you’ll pay in the Mansion’s own coin. Not silver. You have plenty of silver, and silver is easy.”

“Then what coin?” Shi Feng asked.

“Two coins,” Taishi Xu said, and held up a plump finger. “First. In nine days it’s Appeal Day, when any Tianxing who thinks we’ve printed them wrong may come up and say so in the Listing Court. You’ll stand there with them. Your name has jumped from twenty-eighth to seventh in two years, and half of it in the far north, where my scribes have cold fingers. The list should measure what it prints. As the saying goes, when the water goes down, the stones come out.”

Shi Feng waited.

“Second,” Taishi Xu said, and the second finger came up beside the first. “The woman’s reading is light. Elder Sang can cast it. But a reading that reaches back twenty-one years, for someone not present and with only a hairpin to hold, is heavy. I’ll have to cast it myself. Heaven doesn’t like being asked about the past, and it charges the asker’s reader for it. Not in the body. In the years.”

“In your lifespan,” Shi Feng said.

“In my lifespan,” Taishi Xu agreed cheerfully. “So before I cast it, a 6 Mark will refine me the pill that mends what it costs. There’s such a pill in our old books. Nobody has refined it in a hundred and forty years. We haven’t had a 6 Mark up here in that long.”

Shi Feng considered the terms. The Mansion wanted to test him publicly. He could accept that, and Taishi Xu deserved a pill to restore the lifespan spent on his mother’s reading.

“On one condition,” Shi Feng said. “The bouts on Appeal Day are pointers. Nobody’s maimed and nobody dies. I’m here as a guest, not as a target.”

Taishi Xu laughed out loud. His belly shook with it.

“Pointers,” Taishi Xu said, wiping his eye. “Master Shi, pointers are what everyone agrees to before the first cut. But yes. Pointers. I’ll have it written on the court gate.”

“Then it’s agreed,” Shi Feng said.

“Agreed,” Taishi Xu said, rising to bow as deeply as before. “Mingshu will bring you the old recipe tonight. And the list of everyone who’s asked to stand on Appeal Day. It’s grown a little since this morning.”

“How much is a little?” Shi Feng asked.

“Eleven names this morning,” Taishi Xu said happily. “Thirty-two at noon. They all heard you were coming.”

That night Mingshu brought two scrolls to the guest hall on the ninth terrace.

The first was the recipe for the Fate-Settling Pill, copied from an old book in a careful hand. It was a 6 Mark-grade pill, and half the herbs on it had names Shi Feng had only read in Jiang Xu’s oldest catalogues. Mingshu said quietly that the Mansion’s own store held none of them old enough.

The second scroll was a list of names.

Qin Wuyan read it over his shoulder. He stopped at the ninth line and the sixth.

“Murong,” Qin Wuyan said. “Myriad Marrow. And the Mansion’s own chief disciple.”

“The Mansion’s own?” Shi Feng asked, looking at Mingshu.

Daoist Mingshu bowed a little helplessly.

“Senior Brother Yun asked to stand this afternoon,” Daoist Mingshu said. “He said nobody has beaten him on this mountain, and he’d like to keep it that way.”