Chapter 1066 — Another Region

CHAPTER 1066

Another Region

Shi Feng had been ready for that question since the road north, and he used none of the answers he’d prepared.

Jiang Xu had told him to ask plainly, once. The same went for answering.

“She carried me out of the rain when I was dying, Supreme Elder,” Shi Feng said, his hands at his sides. “I owe her.”

Nangong Futian said nothing.

The silence went on. Wind moved over the roof and pushed a little snow off the eaves. The cold kettle sat on the table between them, and neither of them looked at it. Shi Feng didn’t add anything. More words would only make the debt sound smaller.

“That’s all?” Nangong Futian asked at last.

“That’s all,” Shi Feng said.

“Many people owe her,” Nangong Futian said, his voice flat. “A kitchen girl she fed through a bad winter. A courier she paid twice, because she forgot she’d paid him the first time. None of them came to my gate.”

“None of them owe her a life,” Shi Feng said.

“And what do you think one more life is worth to me?” Nangong Futian asked. “I’ve taken more of them than you’ve seen.”

“Not much, Supreme Elder,” Shi Feng said evenly. “That’s why I didn’t bring it to you. I brought it to her.”

Nangong Futian didn’t answer that. His eyes stayed on Shi Feng’s face, and the floor under Shi Feng’s boots gave one small tremor and went still.

“You went to Star-Reckoning Mountain,” Nangong Futian said. “The blind woman read her for you.”

“Elder Sang read along my debt, Supreme Elder,” Shi Feng said. “She had nothing else of the young lady’s to read by.”

“What did she find?” Nangong Futian asked.

It was a test. The old man knew the answer better than anyone alive. He wanted to hear whether Shi Feng would soften it.

“No realm under this heaven,” Shi Feng said. “Qi goes into her, and heaven takes it back. Elder Sang said the stalks had fallen that way once before. For you.”

“For me,” Nangong Futian said. “When the girl was six. I stood on that terrace and watched the same stalks fall the same way, and I’ve spent every year since trying to make them fall differently.”

He said it without any feeling at all. That was worse than if he’d shouted it.

“Then Taishi Xu cracked his own plate,” Nangong Futian went on. “Not for her.”

“For my mother,” Shi Feng said.

Nangong Futian’s eyes rested on his bound palm for a moment.

“That Mansion owes me more than it owes you,” Nangong Futian said. “Remember that, before you go back and ask it anything else.”

Shi Feng noted it and said nothing. Taishi Xu had said nearly the same thing on his own mountain, smiling, and hadn’t explained it either. Two men at the very top of the Empire agreed that the Tianji Mansion owed the Nangong house a debt, and neither of them would say what it was for. Shi Feng put the question away. It wasn’t his to ask today.

Nangong Futian turned his head toward the one narrow window in the hall. It faced south. Through it there was nothing to see but cloud, and somewhere far below the cloud, the Empire, and far past the Empire, the frontier.

“Years ago I had that Mansion read her,” Nangong Futian said. “Not the blind woman. Taishi Xu himself, before his hair went white. He told me her destiny didn’t lie on this mountain. It lay in another region.”

“So you sent her away,” Shi Feng said.

“I sent her where the reading pointed,” Nangong Futian said. “South. Past the Empire’s southern gate, to a place so small that nobody there would know her name.”

He turned his head back from the window and looked at Shi Feng.

It wasn’t the look from the door, the one that saw through everything. This look was slower. It went from the boots, frontier-made and resoled twice, up to the plain robe, the bound palm, the face, and stayed on the face for a long time. Shi Feng stood still under it.

He understood what the old man was thinking, because he was thinking it too.

Nangong Futian had sent his only granddaughter to another region to find her destiny. She’d gone, and she’d come back. And the only thing she’d brought back from that region, as far as anyone on this mountain knew, was a debt with a frontier boy’s name on it.

Whatever the Tianji reading had meant, the old man couldn’t rule out that it meant him.

Nangong Futian looked openly displeased. Shi Feng understood. The reading might point to an alchemist who hadn’t reached Profound Heaven, after the continent’s strongest man had spent years failing to help her.

“I don’t like it,” Nangong Futian said.

“I haven’t proved I can help her yet, Supreme Elder,” Shi Feng said. “I understand why you don’t like it.”

Nangong Futian’s hand stayed on his knee. The cups stayed still. Outside, the wind had stopped, and Shi Feng could hear Matron Yue’s breathing on the other side of the door, slow and careful.

“Fifteen years,” Nangong Futian said. “Fifteen years, and nearly everything I own. Heaven Trampling treasures, sold. Pills nobody else on this continent can make, made. Arrays, bloodlines, old medicines from tombs older than this sect.” He didn’t raise his voice even once. “None of it opened her.”

He leaned forward an inch. The floor shook under Shi Feng’s boots, hard enough this time that the cold kettle slid a finger’s width across the table.

“So tell me, alchemist,” Nangong Futian said. “What can a frontier boy do for her that I couldn’t?”