Chapter 1102 — The Damage Count

CHAPTER 1102

The Damage Count

“Three cracked ribs,” Shi Feng said.

He sat cross-legged on his bedding with his eyes closed and his Spirit Sense turned inward. Lin sat across the fire with his chin in his hand, listening. Qin Wuyan stood in the doorway as always.

“Go on,” Lin Langtian said.

“A band of scorched meridians from the left shoulder to the hip,” Shi Feng said. “They carry qi, but they leak half of it. The left arm has feeling again, but no strength. And my spatial sense is off.”

“Off how?” Lin Langtian asked.

“When I reach for a seam in space, it’s a hand’s width from where I think it is,” Shi Feng said, opening his eyes. “Void-Crossing Step would put me a hand’s width off too. In a fight, that’s the difference between stepping past a blade and stepping into it.”

Shi Feng kept the golden ribs secret. At the Wanyan estate he’d covered them with bandages. He wouldn’t reveal them now.

“And your face?” Lin Langtian asked.

“Not a scratch,” Shi Feng said.

“Shame,” Lin Langtian said. “It could use some character.”

Shi Feng got up with the staff and went into the back of the abode.

The furnace stood in the inner chamber, where the stone had been cut into a round room with a smoke shaft going up through the mountain. It was bronze, three-legged, green with age and taller than he was. Its fire channels were cut in a pattern he’d never seen at the Pavilion, nine spirals that met at the base. Nobody had lit it in a very long time. The channels were choked with dust.

He cleaned it for an hour. Then he set his right palm on the base and let the Thousand Forge Flame Art run out of his hand.

The fire caught on the third try. It ran down the spirals one by one, slowly, and the old bronze ticked and groaned as it warmed. A smell of hot metal and old ash filled the room.

“It’s alive!” Lin Langtian shouted from the doorway. “Junior Brother brought a dead furnace back to life! Somebody write that down!”

“It took three tries,” Shi Feng said, steadying his hand on the bronze. “Don’t shout yet.”

He opened Wanyan Bo’s jade boxes and took out the herbs for a recovery pill, an ordinary one, Shattering Void-grade, the kind he could have made in his sleep in Tianjing. He made two kinds: one to mend meridians, for himself, and one to settle qi and steady the hands.

His hands weren’t steady either.

The first furnace failed. The fire jumped when his left side twitched, and the pills came out black and cracked, six of them, smelling of scorched root.

Shi Feng picked them out of the furnace one by one and ate them.

“He’s doing it again,” Lin Langtian said to Qin Wuyan, shaking his head. “Look at that. The Sky Pavilion’s most important alchemist, eating his own trash.”

“They still hold the herbs’ qi,” Shi Feng said, chewing. “That’s enough for my body to use. I need it.”

That was the plain truth. Six waste pills were six doses of good herbs, and he needed every dose he could get.

Qin Wuyan watched him eat the sixth and said nothing at all.

The second furnace held. The third held too. When he lifted the lid, eight pale green recovery pills lay in the bottom for him, and in the second tray six amber ones for steadying qi. He sealed the amber ones in a jade bottle and held it out to Lin.

“For me?” Lin Langtian asked.

“For your hands,” Shi Feng said.

Lin Langtian looked at the bottle. Then he took it with his left hand, the steadier one, and tucked it into his robe without opening it.

“Yours Truly accepts this tribute,” Lin Langtian said, closing his fingers around the bottle. “You should’ve made your own first.”

Later that afternoon, Lin took him into the library.

Part of the library’s ceiling had collapsed. Fallen shelves lay beneath the rubble, with hundreds of dull green and grey jade slips scattered through the dust.

Lin wandered through it with his hands behind his back as if he’d never been there. Then he stopped, looked down, and kicked a jade slip across the floor. It skidded to a stop against Shi Feng’s boot.

“That was lying there,” Lin Langtian said.

Shi Feng picked it up and pressed it to his forehead.

Heaven-Folding Palm. Profound Heaven-grade.

The first lines were enough. It was a palm art that took hold of a piece of space, and whatever was inside it, and folded it shut. Shattering Void folded space to step through it. This art folded space to take things with it.

“It was lying there,” Shi Feng said, looking at the rubble around it.

“Right there,” Lin Langtian said. “Under three shelves and a rock. Sheer luck.”

“…” Qin Wuyan said from the doorway.

That night Shi Feng sat with his back against the warm furnace and ran his qi through the healed half of his meridians. At the top of the circuit, where peak Shattering Void met the edge of the next realm, he felt the wall.

It was thinner than it had been in the basin. Much thinner.

Shi Feng carefully examined the damage. The Cage, Severed Moon Heaven and Lin Langtian’s forge sky had all put pressure on him. All of it had been pushing on that wall, and the wall had given way under it.

A month of fighting had brought him closer to Profound Heaven than a year’s training. That worried him. He needed to heal the damage before building an inner heaven on it.

“Pills won’t be enough,” Shi Feng said into the dark. “I’ll need better herbs.”

“Then tomorrow we go to town,” Lin Langtian said sleepily from the other side of the fire. “You need herbs. I need sweet potatoes.”