Chapter 1064 — Not Yet

CHAPTER 1064

Not Yet

Shi Feng told her plainly, and he didn’t soften any of it.

“The Mansion’s blind reader cast for you on the Thread Terrace,” Shi Feng said. “Elder Sang Lingyue. I had no token of yours, so she read along my debt to you instead. It took an hour. The reading said your fate holds no realm under this heaven.”

Behind the screen, nothing moved.

“She called it a Heaven-Sealed Vessel,” Shi Feng went on. “Qi goes into you, and heaven takes it back out. You aren’t untrained, and you aren’t weak. You’re closed. It isn’t something in your body. It’s something between you and heaven.”

“Yes,” Nangong Xiuyi said.

That was all she said. She didn’t sound surprised.

“You knew,” Shi Feng said.

“I’ve known since I was small,” Nangong Xiuyi said. “Grandfather never told me. Nobody had to.”

Shi Feng nodded slowly.

“Elder Sang said the stalks had fallen that way once before,” Shi Feng said. “When your grandfather had the same question asked. And the Pavilion has confirmed it. Your grandfather has tried everything a Heaven Trampling cultivator can try, for fifteen years. Treasures, pills, herbs from places no map shows. I won’t tell you what it cost. That’s his to tell.”

“I know what it cost,” Nangong Xiuyi said quietly. “He thinks I don’t.”

Matron Yue’s hands, folded in her sleeves, went still. She looked at the floor.

Shi Feng let a moment pass. Then he said the rest.

“I don’t think another pill will open it,” Shi Feng said. “No pill made under heaven’s eyes will. I think something that heaven can’t see clearly might. There’s a way I want to try. It needs Profound Heaven, and I’m at peak Shattering Void. I can’t do anything for you now. I won’t pretend I can, and I won’t try anything half-ready on you to find out.”

He stopped. Then he said it as plainly as he could.

“At Profound Heaven,” Shi Feng said. “Not before.”

The room was very quiet. The charcoal settled in the brazier.

He waited for the questions. Any patient would have had them. How would it work? How long would it take him? What would it cost her? Was he sure? He’d prepared an answer to each of them on the road from the Mansion, and he’d prepared an honest one for the last: no.

Nangong Xiuyi didn’t ask any of them.

“Then I’ll wait,” Nangong Xiuyi said. “I’ve had practice.”

She sounded calm, with no complaint or demand. Shi Feng felt the trust in that answer and took it seriously.

Shi Feng looked at his cup for a long moment. A girl who’d been closed off from heaven since she was a child, and who couldn’t walk down her own mountain without a guard, had just been told by a stranger that he might help her someday. She hadn’t asked him one thing about herself.

He found that he didn’t have anything to say to that. So he didn’t say anything.

“Lanxin,” Nangong Xiuyi said.

Lanxin came round the screen at once, with the kettle.

“Keep the guest’s tea hot,” Nangong Xiuyi said.

Lanxin filled his cup. Then, instead of going back round the screen, she set the kettle on the brazier beside him, where it would stay warm, and arranged the charcoal under it carefully. She didn’t look at Matron Yue while she did it.

Matron Yue looked at the kettle, then at the screen. She didn’t say anything either.

Shi Feng picked up the cup and drank. The tea was very hot. It still tasted faintly of snow.

“You came a long way to tell me you can’t do anything yet,” Nangong Xiuyi said after a while.

“I’d promised to repay you in person,” Shi Feng said. “I can’t, yet. So I came to tell you so in person. Otherwise I’d only have written it on paper, and you’d have had to take my word for it from somebody else’s hand.”

“And now?” Nangong Xiuyi asked.

“Now you know exactly what I can promise,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll come back when I’m ready.”

Behind the gauze, there was the faint breath again, through the nose. This time he was sure it was a laugh.

Then a bell rang.

It came from above them, from higher up the eighth peak, where Shi Feng hadn’t known there was anything at all. It was a single deep note, slow and heavy, and it rolled down over the little pavilion and on down the mountain into the clouds. The jade wind chime under the eaves trembled, though there was still no wind.

Lanxin froze with her hand on the kettle.

Matron Yue’s face had gone pale. Shi Feng had seen this old woman drive a carriage through a storm without blinking. He had never seen her afraid.

She was afraid now.

“That bell hasn’t rung in four years,” Matron Yue said, very quietly.

“What does it mean, Senior?” Shi Feng asked.

Matron Yue turned her iron-coloured eyes on him. For the first time since Willow Ford, there was something like pity in her face.

“It means the Supreme Elder has sent for you,” Matron Yue said.