Chapter 198 — Skin Is Cheap

CHAPTER 198

Skin Is Cheap

Ring five cost him his sleeves.

They went in the blink of an eye. The cloth on both arms turned brown, then black, then dropped away in flakes. Shi Feng looked down and saw his forearms from wrist to elbow, red and shining under the glow of the walls.

“That's a good robe gone,” Shi Feng said to nobody.

He kept walking despite the pain. Dry heat scraped at every breath and stung his exposed arms. It should have driven him back. Instead, beneath the burning, his body urged him toward the stronger fire ahead.

He was hungry, and the fire was very good food.

[Devoured: cavern fire | Gain: moderate | Note: hot]

The ring-five tablet stood at the edge of a wide ledge. A name was carved into the stone beneath it, deep and neat: Gongsun Ce. Below it, in smaller characters, somebody had added a second line.

Record. Please do not touch.

Shi Feng stopped and read it twice.

Beside the tablet lay a lump of black wood the size of a man's foot. A scrap of dried varnish still clung to one side. It was all that remained of the puppet that had melted.

“A very good puppet,” Shi Feng said softly, and stepped over it.

He didn't touch the tablet. Gongsun Ce's record could stay Gongsun Ce's record. Shi Feng had a debt of coal, a cracked cauldron and a master who swept floors. He had no wish to add a prince's pride to the list in his first week.

Ring six was worse.

The heat there didn't push. It pressed from every side at once, and the orange river on the floor had climbed the walls until the whole tunnel looked like the inside of a furnace. The skin on his arms began to split. Blisters rose, burst and rose again. His face felt as if someone were holding a hot iron an inch from it.

Shi Feng gritted his teeth. The fire was feeding his body even while it burned him. He could endure more than this, and he wouldn’t retreat before he reached his limit.

He remembered yesterday in the lane, with the old man's broom resting on his shoulder.

“Is there a reason?” Shi Feng had asked.

“Funerals cost money,” Li Changyuan had said.

At the time, it had sounded like a joke about the sect's poverty. Now, in the middle of ring six, Shi Feng thought, He might have meant the joke and the warning both.

The Ledger line came again, slowly this time, as if even the Physique was getting full.

[Devoured: cavern fire | Gain: large | Note: very hot]

Then his left forearm began to glow.

A faint light showed beneath the cracked skin. It brightened until gold shone through the burns on his left forearm. Shi Feng felt no new fire there. The light came from his bones.

Shi Feng stopped and looked at it.

He knew what it was. His bones had turned golden back in Bone Refinement, further than any book said was possible. He had just never seen them shine through his own arm.

He thought, If anyone sees this, there won't be enough lies in the world to explain it.

He pulled what was left of his sleeve over the arm. Shi Feng was anxious now. Healing burns could be explained, but nobody was supposed to see those golden bones. He waited until the cloth hid the shine, then checked the tunnel behind him. Empty. The heat made the air wobble, but nothing moved. No elder was standing in the shadows. No disciple had followed.

The gold dimmed slowly as the burns started to close.

Shi Feng breathed out and examined his hands. New pink skin was closing over the burns. Each repaired patch ached sharply, enough to make his fingers twitch. His physique could devour the heat, but healing the damage still hurt.

His qi felt strange too. Thicker, slower, more patient. The late Foundation Establishment ceiling above him hadn't moved, but the floor beneath his cultivation had been poured and packed down.

The elders could reach ring seven. Shi Feng was only at late Foundation Establishment, yet he was about to test their limit. He was excited, but he checked his healing arms again before going farther.

“Right,” Shi Feng said. “One more ring. Then I go back.”

His voice cracked on the second word. Shi Feng swallowed painfully, waited for his throat to ease, and went on.

The tunnel bent downward. At the bottom of the slope, the walls opened into a cavern so bright that the stone looked white. A wide river of liquid fire rolled across the floor, and in the middle of it stood a flat black rock, like an island.

There was a thin trail of smoke rising from the island.

It smelled, impossibly, of something sweet.