Chapter 1050 — No Realm under This Heaven

CHAPTER 1050

No Realm under This Heaven

Shi Feng lifted his hand off the ice. His palm was white and numb, and it left no mark on the surface.

Elder Sang sat with her hands folded in front of the scattered yarrow. She read the stalks with her fingertips one more time, slowly, from one end of the table to the other. Then she spoke in the same flat voice she used for everything.

“No realm under this heaven,” Elder Sang Lingyue said.

“Say it plainly,” Shi Feng said.

“That is plain,” Elder Sang Lingyue said, and touched one stalk. “Her fate holds no realm. Not Meridian Opening, not anything after. The stalks say it the old way: a Heaven-Sealed Vessel. Qi enters her, and heaven takes it back. Every time, all of it.”

“Then she hasn’t been trained,” Shi Feng said slowly. “Or she was trained badly.”

“No,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “Listen to what I said. She isn’t untrained. She’s closed. A mortal is a jar nobody has filled. She’s a jar heaven has put its own lid on. You could pour the whole Serene Jade Sect’s qi into her and heaven would take every drop of it back out.”

Shi Feng was stunned. He kept his hand beside the frozen bowl while he tried to accept what Sang Lingyue had said.

The soft voice in the carriage. The servants who sneered at everyone and the old woman who guarded her. A sect that wouldn’t let anyone near her, and a grandfather people only spoke of quietly. He’d thought something about her was being hidden. He hadn’t thought it was this.

She couldn’t cultivate at all, yet lived among some of the strongest cultivators in the Empire. Shi Feng finally understood why her situation was so difficult.

“Is it a curse?” Shi Feng asked. “A poison? Something someone did to her?”

“The stalks don’t say who,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “They say heaven. That’s all they say.”

“You said you’d seen it once before,” Shi Feng said, his eyes on the ice.

Elder Sang turned her blind face toward the ice in the bowl.

“Once,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “Fifteen years ago. The stalks fell this exact way, and the water froze this exact way, and the man whose hand was on the bowl was the Serene Jade’s Supreme Elder.”

Shi Feng’s heart sank. If Nangong Futian already knew, this wasn’t a problem the sect had simply overlooked.

Nangong Futian. The Star Picker. The strongest man on the continent had sat where he was sitting, fifteen years ago, with his hand on this water, and heard the same words.

And fifteen years later, she was still closed.

“What did he do?” Shi Feng asked.

“He thanked me,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “Then he left, and he didn’t come back. That’s not my business. My business ends at the bowl.”

Footsteps came across the terrace. Taishi Xu had come up the last stair without anyone hearing him, which a Profound Heaven Mansion Master could do when he liked. He wasn’t carrying his teapot, and his round face was smiling as usual.

He looked into the bowl for a long time.

“Ah,” Taishi Xu said softly. “So it’s the same one.”

“You knew,” Shi Feng said.

“I suspected,” Taishi Xu said. “There aren’t many women of the Serene Jade a man asks about with nothing in his hands.” He folded his arms on his belly. “The Mansion owes the Star Picker more than a reading, Master Shi. More than we can repay. So I’ll tell you what the reading says, because it’s yours, and I won’t tell you anything else, because it isn’t.”

“What does the Mansion owe him?” Shi Feng asked, turning to face him.

Taishi Xu just smiled and didn’t answer.

“Elder Sang,” Taishi Xu said instead, turning. “Thank you. You can go and rest.”

Elder Sang rose, picked up her yarrow by feel and tucked the bundle into her sleeve. She left the bowl of ice on the table for someone else to deal with. At the edge of the terrace she passed Qin Wuyan, and the two old people nodded to each other without a word.

“The second reading,” Taishi Xu said when she’d gone. “Your mother’s. That one is mine, and it’s heavy, and you still owe me the pill. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

He went down the stair again. Shi Feng stayed at the table with the frozen bowl.

When he finally stood, Qin Wuyan was waiting at the wall.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said. “The Pavilion buys and sells everything the Empire makes. If the Star Picker spent fifteen years trying to open what heaven closed, he didn’t do it with his own furnace alone. He’d have bought things. Old things. Expensive things.”

“The Pavilion’s books are sealed,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Not to the Pavilion,” Shi Feng said. “I’m asking you to ask. One question, to headquarters. What has the Star Picker bought, and did any of it work?”

Qin Wuyan was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once.

“This one will ask once,” Qin Wuyan said.

That night, in the guest hall on the ninth terrace, Qin Wuyan wrote a single short page in the Pavilion’s cipher, folded it, and pressed it with the Pavilion seal he wore on a cord under his robe. He gave it to the Mansion’s courier with a silver tael and the words “Pavilion business,” and the courier ran.

Shi Feng sat by the window and looked at the mountain’s lamps, terrace after terrace, all the way down.

Heaven took away every bit of qi she gathered. Even Nangong Futian hadn’t found a way to stop it.

He sat there for a long time. He didn’t light his furnace that night.