Chapter 1111 — The Senior Brother Reads People

CHAPTER 1111

The Senior Brother Reads People

“What are you?” Qin Wuyan asked.

He asked it plainly, as he asked everything. He stood just inside the abode’s doorway, where he always stood, with his bound arm across his chest and the valley’s snow light behind him.

Shi Feng lay on a pallet beside the old furnace with his eyes shut. Cold Pine Abode was a long cave hall with a cracked stone floor and dusty shelves, lit only by the furnace glow. He’d been awake for a while. He was too tired to talk, and he wanted to hear the answer.

Lin Langtian sat by the furnace mouth, turning sweet potatoes in the ashes with a stick.

“What am I?” Lin Langtian said. “What kind of question is that to ask a man while he’s cooking?”

“The Pavilion’s report needs a line for you,” Qin Wuyan said. “Peak Profound Heaven. No sect. No name in any record. This one must write something.”

“Write ‘handsome,’” Lin Langtian said.

Qin Wuyan didn’t move.

“Fine. Write ‘a passing disciple of the Artificer Hall, publicly early Nascent Soul,’” Lin Langtian said, flipping a sweet potato. “On paper, that one’s even true.”

“The Pavilion will not believe it,” Qin Wuyan said.

“Then write ‘the man who saved its most important alchemist,’” Lin Langtian said brightly. “That one’s true as well. Yours Truly carried him forty li.”

“The Pavilion asks what you are, not what you did,” Qin Wuyan said.

Lin Langtian sighed very loudly and laid down the stick.

“You’re no fun, Guardian Qin,” Lin Langtian said. “All right. Since you want to know what I am so badly, I’ll tell you what you are instead. It’s more interesting.”

Qin Wuyan said nothing. Lin Langtian took that as permission.

“You knelt by his bed at the Wanyan house and wouldn’t get up,” Lin Langtian said. “I’ve known plenty of men who were afraid of the Pavilion. They don’t kneel. They write long reports with lots of reasons in them. You wrote a short one and put your own seal on it. So it isn’t punishment you’re afraid of.” He picked a coal out of the ash with his bare fingers and dropped it back. “You were late once, at the basin. You’re afraid of being late twice.”

Qin Wuyan was shaken. His bound hand slowly closed against his chest.

“…” Qin Wuyan said.

“Write that, if you like,” Lin Langtian said, more gently. “About yourself.”

Qin Wuyan looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned back to the doorway and the snow, and didn’t ask again.

Lin Langtian chuckled and poked the fire. After a while he pointed the stick at the pallet.

“And that one,” Lin Langtian said quietly, pointing the stick at the pallet. “Do you know why he repays every favour at once, Guardian Qin? Kings, sects, me. If someone helps him, he pays it back within the week.”

“Pride,” Qin Wuyan said, without turning.

“No,” Lin Langtian said. “A man who repays every favour at once never has to say thank you. Once it’s paid, nobody owes anybody. He’d rather owe silver than owe a person. Silver he can count.” He turned a sweet potato over and looked at its black skin. “He’s been writing down what he owes me in that little book of his. He thinks I haven’t noticed.”

“Will you let him repay you?” Qin Wuyan asked.

“Never,” Lin Langtian said, laughing under his breath. “If I let him, he’ll pay it the same day, and then he’ll feel better. Why would I let him feel better?”

Shi Feng kept his eyes shut.

Shi Feng didn’t argue, because Lin Langtian was right. He thought of the page in his private book with Lin Langtian’s name at the top. Forty li, carried. The broth. The Cage. There was no price written beside any of them, because every time he’d lifted the brush he hadn’t been able to think of one.

Lin Langtian had understood that page without ever opening the book.

The fire ticked. One of the sweet potatoes split in the heat, and the smell of it filled the cave. Shi Feng listened to the wind on the valley rim and to the uneven tapping of Lin Langtian’s stick against the furnace stones. Lin Langtian’s hand was shaking again. It had shaken every day since the basin.

Shi Feng was worried. That was another debt in the book with no price beside it.

“When he wakes up properly,” Lin Langtian said, in his loud voice again, “Yours Truly is going to teach him something. Not one of those fake lessons he’s been repeating under my name for years. A real one.”

“Which?” Qin Wuyan asked.

“The only one that matters past Shattering Void,” Lin Langtian said. “How to build a sky.”