Chapter 1055 — The Caster Falls

CHAPTER 1055

The Caster Falls

The plate cracked.

A line ran across the bronze from the north rim to the south, straight through the centre, with a sharp, splitting sound. The silver in a hundred pits went dark at once. Then a second crack crossed the first.

“Master!” Daoist Mingshu shouted.

The yarrow under Elder Sang’s arm caught fire by itself. She threw it down, and the stalks were ash before they hit the stone. The water in her bowl boiled and was gone.

Taishi Xu coughed.

Blood came out of his mouth in a spray and spattered across the cracked bronze. He was still kneeling with his palms on the rim, and he didn’t take them off. He couldn’t. Shi Feng saw it at once. The old man’s hands were stuck to the plate, and the pale blue light from the hairpin had turned. It wasn’t rising into the sky any more. It was running back down the three threads, into the bronze, along the cracks and into Taishi Xu’s palms.

The Mansion Master’s hair was turning white.

It went from the roots outward, grey, then white, while Shi Feng watched. His round face sagged. Lines cut into it that hadn’t been there a breath before.

“It’s taking his years!” a reader cried out from the first ring. “Someone pull him off!”

“Don’t touch the bronze!” Elder Sang Lingyue snapped. “Touch it and it takes you too!”

The frightened watchers stopped. They wanted to help, but Sang Lingyue’s warning made them afraid that touching him would only add another victim.

Shi Feng thought, The light is coming through the hairpin. I have to take it off the plate. The light came from the hairpin, and as long as the hairpin lay at the centre, whatever had thrown the reading back would keep pouring down that road into the man at the other end of it. Pulling Taishi Xu off might kill him. Taking the road away wouldn’t.

He stood up off the asker’s stool and put his right hand into the light.

The pain was immediate. It wasn’t fire, though it felt like it. It went into his palm and through it and kept going, and his Spirit Sense, which he’d spread thinly across the plate to watch it, was struck white and silent in one blow. For a moment he couldn’t sense anything at all beyond his own skin.

His fingers closed on the hairpin.

He pulled it out of the centre of the plate and stepped back, and the blue light went out.

The silence afterwards was total.

Shi Feng looked down at his hand. The skin of his palm was gone in a ring around where the hairpin lay. Through the burnt flesh at its centre, he could see the white of bone. The hairpin itself was cold again.

Across the plate, Taishi Xu let go of the bronze and fell sideways onto the stone.

“Mansion Master!”

“He’s not breathing!”

“Fetch the physicians! Fetch anyone!”

Elder Sang was already kneeling beside him with two fingers on his throat. Her face didn’t change, but her voice dropped.

“There’s a pulse,” Elder Sang Lingyue said. “It’s going. It’s not in his body, Master Shi. It’s lower than that. It’s in his years.”

Shi Feng put the hairpin into his sleeve with his left hand and knelt on Taishi Xu’s other side. He didn’t waste time asking. He reached into the old man’s left sleeve and took out the small jade box that Taishi Xu had put there eleven days ago with a smile. For afterwards.

The Fate-Settling Pill lay in the box, the size of a longan, its dark amber shell still showing the gold light turning under it. It was warm.

“Open his mouth,” Shi Feng said.

Elder Sang opened it. Shi Feng laid the pill on the Mansion Master’s tongue and closed his jaw with his left hand.

Nothing happened. The pill sat there and didn’t melt.

Shi Feng was worried, but understood why the pill hadn’t melted. He’d refined it specifically to reach past the body. Karma backlash lived in a man’s lifespan, not his flesh. A body under that kind of damage stopped taking in medicine at all, because the body wasn’t what was dying. The pill had to be carried past the flesh, past the meridians, down to the root of his life, and Taishi Xu couldn’t carry it himself any more.

Shi Feng decided to guide it himself. He couldn’t wait for Taishi Xu to recover enough strength.

He reached for his Spirit Sense to guide it and found nothing there. It was still white and numb.

“Master Shi, your sense—” Daoist Mingshu began, kneeling beside him.

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll do it by hand.”

He laid his left palm flat on the old man’s chest, over the heart, and lit the Second Anvil Fire.

He didn’t burn anything. He kept the flame very low, inside his own fingers, and beat it into the old man’s chest in short pulses, once, then again, then again. Each pulse pushed a little warmth down through Taishi Xu’s ribs. Without Spirit Sense, he couldn’t see where it went. He had to feel it through his palm, by the heat under his hand and the tiny shifts of the old man’s flesh.

On the ninth pulse, the pill melted.

He felt it go. The medicine ran down the old man’s throat and spread into his chest, and then it stopped and pooled there, against the wall of the body. Shi Feng beat the fire again, harder, and pushed it on, past the heart, past the dantian, down to the place below them all where a man’s years were kept. It was slow, heavy work.

“Twelve,” Elder Sang Lingyue said quietly beside him. She was counting the breaths again, though nobody was breathing. “Thirteen.”

Sweat ran into his eyes. His burned right hand was shaking on his knee. Somewhere at the edge of the terrace, Qin Wuyan had turned round and was watching him.

“Twenty,” Elder Sang Lingyue said.

Shi Feng beat the fire once more.

Taishi Xu’s chest rose.

It was a small breath, thin and rough. Then there was another one, and a third.

Relief spread across the terrace. The watchers crowded closer, staring at Taishi Xu’s rising chest.

“He’s breathing! The Mansion Master’s breathing!”

“The guest saved him, with one hand!”

“Without Spirit Sense? How do you even refine like that?”

“…”

“As long as the green hills remain, there’ll be firewood,” an old reader said shakily, and sat down on the stone where he stood.

Shi Feng kept his palm on the old man’s chest for another hundred breaths before he took it away. Then he sat back on his heels and looked at Taishi Xu’s face.

His hair was white to the ends. He looked twenty years older than he had at sunset.

“Will he wake?” Shi Feng asked.

“At dawn,” Elder Sang Lingyue said, and took her fingers from the old man’s throat. “If he wakes, Master Shi, he’ll have something to tell you. Whatever it was, it cost him.”