Chapter 1086 — A Debt Not Due

CHAPTER 1086

A Debt Not Due

“You’re bleeding all over my cave,” Tan Ershu said, sniffing. “Young master, you’re bleeding everywhere.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said. “I need to stop it.”

The broken ribs had opened something inside, and every time he breathed he tasted blood. There was nothing left in his sea of qi to close it. Shi Feng knew that if he lay down in this cave and slept, he wouldn’t wake.

“Do you have any roots on you?” Shi Feng asked. “Anything you were drying?”

Tan Ershu blinked at him. Then he dug both hands into his sheepskin coat and came out with a twist of cloth.

“Red pine-root,” Tan Ershu said. “For my wife’s knees. And some bloodmoss. It’s not very good bloodmoss.”

Shi Feng took it. He added three dried herbs from his ring, the cheapest he carried, and laid them all on the palm of his good hand.

There was no furnace, so Shi Feng used his hand.

He lit the Thousand Forge Flame in his palm and struck the Second Anvil Fire inside it. Nine beats and a rest, very small, very low. The herbs lifted off his skin and turned slowly in the fire, and their juices ran together. He held the fire closed around them with nothing but his own qi. Every beat cost him, and his hand shook, but he kept the fire still.

Under the cave roof, three thin clouds formed and hung there in the smoke.

Tan Ershu stared up at them with his mouth open.

“Clouds,” Tan Ershu whispered. “In my cave. In my own cave!”

Three clouds made a Common pill, the lowest grade a pill could have and still be a pill. Shi Feng hadn’t refined one in years, and he was glad of this one. He opened his hand and looked at it, a lumpy dark red bead that smelled of pine.

He ate it.

It went down hot. The blood in his mouth slowed and stopped. It didn’t mend anything. It only closed what was bleeding, and gave him enough to stay awake.

“Eat,” Tan Ershu said, pushing something into his good hand. It was a strip of dried mutton, so tough he could barely bite it. “You need to eat. My wife says you can’t fight on an empty stomach. Well, she says you can’t argue on an empty stomach, but it’s the same thing.”

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said. He ate it.

Tan Ershu talked. He talked about his wife’s knees, and his grandson, who was seven and played the flute badly, and his son, the grandson’s father, who’d gone over a cliff gathering snow lotus four winters ago. He talked about the Wanyan house, which bought Lower Pine’s roots and paid late, and about the bandits, who weren’t bandits, he knew that, he wasn’t stupid. He talked fast and too loud, and twice Shi Feng had to tell him to keep his voice down.

Shi Feng let him talk. It kept him awake.

“When the great tree falls, the monkeys scatter,” Tan Ershu said gloomily. “That’s what my father used to say.”

Shi Feng didn’t answer. He was listening to the sweep outside, a long way off, still coming back from the north-east.

Then something at his belt went tick.

It was a small sound. He felt it more than heard it, against his hip. He reached down with his good hand and untied the black jade token Long Caili had given him in Tianjing, the one for her business in the north.

It had cracked clean in two.

Nobody had touched it. It had hung at his belt the whole night, through the palms and the fall, and it hadn’t cracked then. It had cracked just now, by itself, while he sat bleeding in a cave.

Shi Feng held the two halves in his palm. He understood what had happened, and he felt sick.

It was a paired jade. The Long household made them in twos, one for the holder and one kept by the giver, and when the holder’s life was close enough to its end, both halves cracked together. Somewhere on the south road, in a Long household sledge, the other half had just broken in Long Caili’s hand. She would think he was dying.

“Take Qin Wuyan’s advice, Master Shi. Not your own,” she’d said at the waystation. She’d looked at the thirty Wanyan riders once, and given his party her fresh horses.

He put the two halves back in his sleeve, very carefully, side by side.

Then, only once, he let himself think of a quiet room high on the Serene Jade’s inner peak, a screen of jade beads, and Nangong Xiuyi’s soft voice behind it.

“At Profound Heaven,” he’d told her. “Not before.”

“Then I’ll wait,” she’d said. “I’ve had practice.”

Tan Ershu was looking at him.

“Young master,” Tan Ershu said in a small voice. “Are you dying?”

“No,” Shi Feng said. “The pill stopped the bleeding.”

“You look like you’re dying,” Tan Ershu said. “My son looked like that at the bottom of the cliff.”

“I can’t die here,” Shi Feng said. “I owe someone a debt. It isn’t due until I reach Profound Heaven. If I die in this cave, I can never repay it.”

Tan Ershu thought about that for a while, clutching his grandson’s flute.

“That’s a very stupid reason to live,” Tan Ershu said at last. “It’s the best one I’ve heard.”

Shi Feng was touched, and almost smiled.

Then he breathed in, and stopped.

The cave still smelled of his pill. Pine-root, bloodmoss and the hot iron smell of the Second Anvil Fire hung under the roof where the three clouds had been, and drifted out past the turn toward the mouth. Shi Feng understood the danger at once.

Outside, from the north-east, the sweep was coming back. This time it was moving slowly, and it was coming straight down the west slope.