Chapter 1052 — Fate-Settling

CHAPTER 1052

Fate-Settling

Wind swept the open stone floor around the bronze tower on Star-Reckoning Mountain’s highest terrace.

At dawn, Shi Feng set Mo’s cauldron in the centre and laid out the herbs on a cloth.

Nine-Turn Longevity Root, eight hundred years old and curled tight. Withered Crane Grass, dry and grey. A whole Old Pine Heart, the amber core of a pine that had stood for two thousand years, cut out of the trunk in one piece. A shell’s worth of Sea Turtle Moss. Three silver-veined lingzhi that he’d taken as half a fee in Tianjing and never found a use for.

Daoist Mingshu stood at the edge of the floor with a brush and a ledger, writing it all down. When he reached the end of the list, he stopped writing and added it up twice.

“Master Shi,” Daoist Mingshu said faintly. “This is six hundred thousand worth of herbs. Your own.”

“About that,” Shi Feng said.

“The Mansion can pay for—” Daoist Mingshu began, lowering his brush.

“The Mansion doesn’t have them,” Shi Feng said, kneeling to check the cauldron’s vents. “You told me so yourself. Nothing in your store is old enough. Your Master asked for this pill as his fee. If I fail it because I used young herbs, I haven’t paid.”

Mingshu bowed and wrote the number down a third time.

Taishi Xu came up the tower stair with his teapot, and Qin Wuyan took up his place at the edge of the floor with his back to the wind. Below them, terrace after terrace, the Mansion’s disciples had found reasons to be outside.

“The old book says a hundred and forty years,” Taishi Xu said, settling onto a stone bench. “And the last man who refined it took nine days and lost two batches. Take as long as you like.”

“Then I’ll start,” Shi Feng said.

He’d studied the recipe for nine days. The herbs weren’t the difficulty. Any 6 Mark could have refined longevity herbs into a pill that added years to an old man’s body.

The difficulty was where the cost would land.

When a diviner read twenty-one years back, heaven didn’t break his bones or burn his meridians. It took his years. The backlash sat in his lifespan, and a man’s lifespan wasn’t in his body. An ordinary pill went into the body, and the body used it. The longevity herbs would do their work there and stop. They’d never reach the place where the years had been lost.

So the Fate-Settling Pill had to carry its herbs past the body without the body eating them on the way. Then it had to carry them past the lifespan’s own wall, which didn’t let anything from outside in.

Two walls, and a pill that had to go through both.

He lit the Thousand Forge Flame under the cauldron, low, and began with the Old Pine Heart.

For the whole morning he didn’t refine the pill at all. He refined its shell. The Second Anvil Fire beat the pine amber down, softened it, folded it and beat it again, until it was a resin so dense that no stomach and no meridian in the world could take it apart. It would pass through a body untouched.

That was the first wall.

“He’s building a box,” someone whispered on the terrace below, leaning over the rail.

“Why would you build a box around a pill?”

“So nothing opens it too early, idiot.”

At noon he started on the longevity herbs, and the work went slow. The eight-hundred-year-old Nine-Turn Root resisted his fire for two hours. Shi Feng adjusted each beat patiently until its thick golden essence finally emerged. The Withered Crane Grass went in after it, then the turtle moss.

By evening he had the core of the pill, a slow gold mass turning in the bottom of the cauldron inside its resin shell.

It was still only half a pill. It could go through the body. It couldn’t go through the second wall.

Shi Feng sat back, troubled by the unfinished pill. He’d identified this difficulty on the first day, but still needed a way past it. The recipe in the old book said only “guide it with something that knows the way.” The man who’d written it had either known what that meant, or hadn’t wanted to say.

Something that knew the way to where a man’s fate was kept.

He looked up. Elder Sang Lingyue was standing at the top of the tower stair, one hand on the rail. Nobody had seen her come up.

“Elder Sang,” Shi Feng said. “The yarrow you read with. The old stalks. What do you do with them when they’re used?”

“Burn them,” Elder Sang Lingyue said flatly. “Every forty years. The last burning was thirty-nine years ago.”

“Then you have thirty-nine years of them,” Shi Feng said, standing up.

Elder Sang was silent for a moment. Her blind face turned toward the cauldron.

“Every stalk in that bundle has touched someone’s fate,” Elder Sang Lingyue said slowly. “Thousands of them.”

“That’s what the recipe needs,” Shi Feng said, looking at the cauldron. “They’ve already reached the place this pill must enter.”

She stood there a moment longer. Then she turned and went back down the stair, and the terraces below went completely silent watching her go.

A quarter of an hour later, two disciples came up the stair carrying a cedar chest between them. They set it down beside the cauldron and opened the lid.

Inside it lay thirty-nine years of grey yarrow, tied in bundles with red thread.

Taishi Xu put down his teapot.

“She’s never given anyone those,” Taishi Xu said quietly. “Not even me.”

Shi Feng was grateful. He bowed toward the empty stair before carefully feeding the first bundle into the fire.

The flame under the cauldron turned silver. Up above the bronze tower, in the evening sky over Star-Reckoning Mountain, the first cloud began to form.