Chapter 1057 — The Star Picker’s Account

CHAPTER 1057

The Star Picker’s Account

The Pavilion’s courier came up the mountain on the fourth day, in the grey of the Ninefold Tower, with a sealed tube on a cord round his neck.

He didn’t go to the guest hall. He went to Qin Wuyan, who was sitting on the guest hall’s step in the sun, and knelt on one knee before him.

“Guardian Qin,” the courier said. “From the Tower, under the Pavilion seal. In reply to your query. Master Jiang Xu wrote it himself.”

Qin Wuyan took the tube, checked the seal with his thumb, and broke it. He read the letter through once, slowly. Then he rolled it up again and held it out to Shi Feng without getting up.

“It concerns the guest elder,” Qin Wuyan said. “This one only asked.”

Shi Feng took it with his left hand. His right was still bound to the wrist, and the burn under the linen had begun to itch, which the Mansion’s physician said was a good sign. His Spirit Sense had come back that morning as a faint grey haze, enough to feel the walls of the room and not much more.

He sat on the step beside the old man and read.

Jiang Xu’s hand was small and neat.

Guardian Qin. The tower has the answer to your question, and I have it from my own memory as well, so I’ll give you both.

The Nangong girl cannot cultivate. The Mansion’s reading is correct. Heaven gives her qi and takes it back. Every 6 Mark of the Pavilion has been asked about her, privately, at one time or another. I was asked twice.

For fifteen years the Star Picker has sold the Pavilion treasures of the Heaven Trampling grade, one at a time, through a third hand, at whatever price we named. With every coin he has bought things that open what heaven has closed. Marrow that remembers. Lotus from places no map shows. Pills that six of us refined and three of us died for. None of it worked.

He has very little left to sell.

Tell the boy I said this: the Pavilion knows only what it has been paid for. Everything else is his.

There was no signature, only the tower’s small seal at the bottom.

Shi Feng read it twice more. Then he sat with it on his knee and looked out over the terraces.

“Bad news, Master Shi?” the courier asked carefully.

“It answers my question,” Shi Feng said, folding the letter to keep the rest private.

“That’s good, then,” the courier said, looking relieved.

“Rest, and eat,” Shi Feng said. “Guardian Qin will have a reply for you tomorrow.”

The courier bowed and went off with one of the Mansion’s disciples to find the kitchens.

Shi Feng went inside, sat at the table in his guest hall and laid out a fresh sheet of paper. He weighed the corners with his ink stone and his tea bowl. Then he took the brush in his left hand and began to work it through, one line at a time.

The strongest man on the continent had spent fifteen years and almost everything he owned. He had the best alchemists in the world and his own 6 Mark hands. If any pill could open her, he’d have found it. So the first line was simple.

A pill can’t stop heaven taking her qi.

A pill put qi into a body. Heaven took it out again. It didn’t matter how good the pill was, because heaven wasn’t the body’s opponent. It was the owner of the qi.

The second line took longer. He wrote it, crossed it out and wrote it again.

An inner heaven deceives heaven.

That was what Profound Heaven was. A cultivator opened a sealed space inside himself that imitated heaven, sky, ground and law, and the imitation was good enough that no tribulation fell on him. It was the only realm that went past heaven by fooling it instead of fighting it. Zhongli Cangsong had said it opened like a room that had always been in the house, with the door painted over.

The third line was the one that mattered.

Futian made every attempt in front of the heaven that watches him most.

A Heaven Trampling cultivator walked through tribulation after tribulation. Heaven watched him more closely than any other man alive, because he kept stepping on it. Every treasure the Star Picker bought, every pill he refined for her, he’d brought to her under that gaze. Whatever he tried, heaven had been looking straight at it.

Shi Feng put the brush down and read the three lines together.

Shi Feng felt hopeful for the first time since the Thread Terrace. He didn’t have an inner heaven yet and couldn’t test his idea. But now he had a reason to seek Profound Heaven beyond gaining strength.

“Senior Qin,” Shi Feng said.

Qin Wuyan came in from the step.

“How is a claim of treatment filed?” Shi Feng asked. “The old kind. Made by an alchemist to a patient’s house.”

Qin Wuyan was silent for a moment. Then he sat down across the table, which he almost never did.

“Under the Mark,” Qin Wuyan said. “In the alchemist’s own hand. Addressed to the house, not the patient. Sealed with the Mark plate. This one has not seen one filed in two hundred years.”

“Tell me exactly how to write it,” Shi Feng said, taking a clean sheet. “I’ll put my Mark behind the claim.”

He wrote it slowly with his left hand, as neatly as he could make it. He set out his name and his Mark, the Mansion’s reading and the Pavilion’s confirmation. He wrote the three lines under them. He wrote, last of all, that he could do nothing yet and would come back at Profound Heaven, and that he asked only to be heard by the house once before he went.

He addressed it to the house of Nangong, at the Serene Jade Sect. Then he pressed his 6 Mark plate into the warm wax.

Qin Wuyan looked at the sealed claim on the table, then at him.

“This one carries nothing up that mountain,” Qin Wuyan said. “The guest elder carries it.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “That’s why I wrote it myself.”

He wrote one more letter that night, for the courier to take back. It was very short.

Master Jiang. Received. Thank you. I’ll bring the rest of the answer myself.

Then he blew out the lamp. In the dark, far below on the printing floor, the presses were still running.