Chapter 1049 — Along the Debt

CHAPTER 1049

Along the Debt

By the next morning there was a queue outside the guest hall on the ninth terrace.

Tianxing geniuses queued down the steps and around the terrace. The thirty-first was there with her master’s letter. The fifteenth and fourteenth stood together in silence. Murong Tuo was at the front with a bundle of herbs on his back the size of a small child.

“I came first,” Murong Tuo announced to the queue, holding his ribs. “I got hit first. That’s fair.”

Nobody argued with him. Nobody wanted to be thrown into the stands either.

Shi Feng sat at the table inside with Qin Wuyan at the door and Mingshu, who had appointed himself, writing the orders down. Each guest came in, bowed, named the trouble and named a price. Most arrived with prepared speeches. They forgot them when Shi Feng checked their wrists or breathing and named the trouble before they could.

“How did you know it was the left kidney meridian?” the fifteenth asked, pale.

“You sit leaning right,” Shi Feng said. “You’ve done it for two years. Two hundred thousand, half in herbs. I’ll send the pill to your sect in a month.”

“Two hundred thousand,” the fifteenth said faintly, and signed.

It went on for three days. By the end of it, Mingshu’s list held eleven commissions worth about one million two hundred thousand. Half of it came in cash and half in herbs, because the young geniuses of the Empire carried their sects' herbs more easily than their sects' silver. Shi Feng’s cash came to about twenty-three million three hundred thousand. He put the herbs in his ring with the rest and didn’t count them twice.

Murong Tuo’s two marrow pills were the first he refined, on the second night, in the guest furnace room. Murong Tuo ate the first one standing at the furnace door and sat down on the floor.

“It’s warm,” Murong Tuo said, astonished. “My bones are warm. Master Shi, you’ve made me need a third.”

“If you need a third, bring the herbs,” Shi Feng said, checking Murong Tuo’s breathing.

On the fourth morning, Elder Sang Lingyue sent for him.

The Thread Terrace was the smallest terrace on the mountain, a round stone platform near the top with no hall and no roof, only a low wall around it and the sky above. In the middle of it stood a plain wooden table. On the table lay a bundle of yarrow stalks and a wide bowl of black stone, filled to the brim with water.

Elder Sang was sitting behind the table. She was a small, straight-backed old woman in faded grey, with her white hair pinned flat. Her eyes were open and milky white. She didn’t turn her head when he came in. She didn’t need to.

“Master Shi,” Elder Sang Lingyue said flatly. “Sit. Don’t touch the water yet.”

He sat across from her. Qin Wuyan stopped at the edge of the terrace and turned his back to them both.

“The Mansion Master says it’s a woman of the Serene Jade Sect,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “Do you have anything of hers? Hair? A letter? A thread from her clothes?”

“Nothing,” Shi Feng said. “She carried me out of the rain in her carriage. I never saw her face. I only heard her voice. She left me alive and left nothing else.”

“Then you’ve brought me nothing to read her by,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. She didn’t sound annoyed. She was only stating a fact. “Usually I’d send you away.”

“You have another way?” Shi Feng asked.

“You said she left you alive,” Sang Lingyue said, finding the yarrow with steady fingers. “Then she left something. You owe her. A debt runs between two people, from one end to the other. If I can’t find her by her hair, I’ll find her along your debt.”

Shi Feng was silent for a moment.

“Will it work?” Shi Feng asked, looking at the still water.

“A debt is a thread, Master Shi,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “Hold your end. Put your right hand flat on the water. Don’t let it sink, and don’t take it away, no matter what you feel. If you take it away, the thread breaks and we start again next season.”

He put his right hand on the water.

It was very cold. It held his palm up on its surface without letting it sink. The water didn’t ripple at all.

Elder Sang began to drop the stalks.

She didn’t throw them. She held the bundle above the table and let them fall one at a time, in their own time, and she listened to each one land. Sometimes she gathered a few back up. Sometimes she left them where they lay. She counted under her breath, but not in numbers he knew.

At first he felt nothing. Then, after a long while, he felt the water under his palm grow heavier and begin to push up against it, slowly and steadily.

He kept his hand still.

The sun moved across the terrace. The shadow of the low wall crossed the table and the bowl. The stalks went on falling. Qin Wuyan didn’t move once.

Shi Feng remembered the carriage, the woman’s soft voice and the pill that saved him. He felt grateful and ashamed that he still hadn’t repaid her. The pressure under his palm grew steadily, and the cold went up his arm into his shoulder.

An hour passed.

Then the last stalk fell, and Elder Sang went very still.

Under Shi Feng’s hand, the water had gone hard. It had turned to ice, from the brim to the bottom of the bowl, without a single crack.

Elder Sang’s white eyes moved for the first time. They turned toward the bowl, and her flat old face changed.

“Take your hand off,” Elder Sang Lingyue said, very quietly. “Slowly. I’ve seen this once before.”