Chapter 1074 — A Heaven with a Crack

CHAPTER 1074

A Heaven with a Crack

The sickroom was hot, dark and smelled of old medicine.

A brazier burned in each corner. Furs hung over the windows. Wanyan Bo had been helped from the hall to a wide bed of black wood, and he lay propped on cushions with his big grey hands on the blanket, breathing slowly. Wanyan Che stood at the foot of the bed. Hong Lie stood at the door, with his back to it.

Shi Feng sat down on a stool by the bed. His left arm was still numb, so he laid it across his knee and took the patriarch’s wrist with his right hand.

“Patriarch,” Shi Feng said. “I need to put my Spirit Sense inside your heaven. Inside it, not around it. You’ll feel me there. Don’t push me out.”

“Seven healers came,” Wanyan Bo said, his deep voice tired. “None of them asked to go inside.”

“The pulse tells me it’s leaking,” Shi Feng said. “I need to see where the seal broke before I choose a pill.”

Wanyan Bo looked at him for a moment, then closed his eyes.

“Go in,” Wanyan Bo said.

His Spirit Sense had healed since the plate. He let it go along the patriarch’s pulse, past the meridians and the sea of qi, to the place where a Profound Heaven cultivator kept the thing that made him one. There was a door there. It wasn’t a real door, but his sense felt it as one, heavy and closed, and as he touched it the patriarch let it open.

Shi Feng went in.

He was standing under a sky.

It was a grey-blue sky, high and cloudless. Under it a plain of black stone ran away in every direction, flat and endless, and across the plain ran one river. It flowed out to the edge of the plain and turned and came back again, because Wanyan Bo had decided that it should. The air was cold and clean and very still.

Shi Feng stood in it and felt his breath catch.

He’d made Profound Heaven pills and stood under Profound Heaven pressure, but he’d never seen an inner heaven from the inside.

So this was what it was. It was a sealed space, folded shut on every side, and inside it a man had copied heaven: a sky, a ground and a law. The law here said the river ran out and came back. It said Wanyan Bo’s qi moved where Wanyan Bo wished and nowhere else. Heaven outside would look at this place and see a small heaven, and take it for part of itself.

He understood now why no tribulation fell on Profound Heaven. There was nothing for heaven to strike. It would have been striking itself.

Then he looked up and saw the crack.

It ran across the grey-blue sky from one horizon to the other, a black line as wide as a hand at its middle, narrowing toward both ends. Along its whole length, the sky’s edges were curling back. And through it, in a slow, steady stream, the inner heaven was running out: grey light, cold air and the patriarch’s qi, all flowing up and out into the dark beyond the sky.

The crack wasn’t a wound in the ground or the air. It was a break in the fold itself, in the seal that held the copy shut. Mending the sky would do nothing. Something would have to close the seal from the inside and hold it while it healed.

He withdrew his Spirit Sense slowly and opened his eyes in the hot room.

“Well?” Wanyan Che asked at once. “Master Shi, can it—”

“It can be mended,” Shi Feng said.

Wanyan Che let out a breath and grabbed the bedpost.

“The crack’s in the seal, not in the heaven,” Shi Feng said. “That’s why the pills your house tried didn’t work. They fed the heaven, and the heaven just leaked it out again. I’ll make a Heaven-Mending Pill. It’s Profound Heaven-grade. It goes in, finds the seal and closes it, and holds it shut until the seal remembers how to hold itself.”

“What do you need?” Wanyan Bo asked, his eyes still closed.

Shi Feng named them. Star-Ice Lotus, nine petals, at least a thousand years old. Heaven-Thread Vine, the whole vine with the root. Earth Marrow Crystal, two fists of it. Wind-Still Grass. Three Northern Pine Hearts. And a dozen smaller herbs to bind them.

“The vault,” Wanyan Bo said. “Che. Take him.”

Wanyan Che bowed and led the way without a word.

The Wanyan vault was cut into the rock under the main hall, behind three iron doors that Wanyan Che opened with the house seal. It was long and cold, with black stone shelves from floor to ceiling.

Half of them were empty.

Shi Feng saw it at once. The dust on the empty shelves lay in clean rectangles where boxes had stood until recently, months and not years. Some of the labels were still pasted to the stone. Snow Ginseng, four hundred years. Black Tortoise Shell. Frost Dragon Scale. All gone.

Wanyan Che walked down the shelves and took down every herb Shi Feng had named, one jade box at a time, without a word. He didn’t look at the empty shelves, and he didn’t explain them.

Shi Feng took them and said nothing either.

He thought it through on the way back up. A house that paid three million six hundred thousand to save its patriarch was a house that loved him. A house that had sold half its vault in less than a year was a house that needed money badly. The Wanyan house had done both. Whatever had emptied those shelves, it hadn’t been medicine for the patriarch. None of those labels were for a cracked heaven.

Shi Feng was suspicious, but the empty shelves alone proved nothing. He would treat Wanyan Bo first and keep watching Wanyan Che.

“Where will you refine, Master Shi?” Wanyan Che asked at the top of the stairs. “The sickroom has the warmest—”

“The courtyard,” Shi Feng said.

Wanyan Che stared at him.

“A Profound Heaven pill’s clouds need open sky,” Shi Feng said. “And this house has been waiting a year. They should see what their herbs are buying.”

He looked out at the broken black granite under the lamps, at the ring of shattered flagstones where he’d stood an hour ago.

“Have someone sweep up the gravel,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll start at dawn.”