Chapter 210 — The Bill

CHAPTER 210

The Bill

The Grade Seven war puppet moved before the incense finished its first curl.

Shi Feng saw the left broadsword come down and stepped aside. The blade missed his shoulder. The puppet's right elbow caught him in the ribs instead, and the whole array hall rang like a struck gong.

One.

He struck the wall and spat. Sixty outer disciples crowded the gallery, staring in alarm.

[Devoured: Grade Seven puppet blow | Gain: small | Note: that was a lot of wood]

Shi Feng stood up. The puppet turned its smiling face toward him and waited.

Gongsun Ce stood at the control stand in the corner with both hands on a plate of array lines. He didn't gloat. His face was grave and his fingers moved steadily.

“Concede,” Gongsun Ce said. “This is a Grade Seven. It fights like an early Golden Core cultivator, and you are only late Foundation Establishment.”

“I know,” Shi Feng said.

“Then stop,” Gongsun Ce said.

“Then tell him to stop,” Shi Feng said, glancing at the puppet. “I haven’t conceded, and the rules don’t require me to.”

Gongsun Ce pressed the plate. The puppet came forward.

Two. Three. Four.

The blows landed on his arms, his back, his thigh. Each one drove the air out of him and sent a thin, hot ache through the bones. Shi Feng didn't fall down again. By the fourth hit he had stopped watching the swords and started watching the elbows.

They were the problem. The puppet's elbows and shoulders glowed faintly red every time it struck, and a thin sheen of melted wax ran out of the seams. Song Tai had said it plainly that afternoon. Grade Seven bodies ran hot, and Gongsun Ce sealed every joint with cooling wax to keep them from seizing.

Shi Feng thought, Wax melts. And if something eats the wax faster than it melts…

He reached into his sleeve with his left hand. In it was a rag soaked in furnace lye.

Five. The puppet's sword cut his sleeve open at the shoulder. Shi Feng stepped inside the swing, instead of away from it, and slapped the wet rag against its right elbow seam as it passed.

Six. A blade hilt cracked across his back. He used the moment to wipe the rag over the left shoulder.

“What is he doing?” a disciple whispered.

“Hugging it!”

“He's lost his mind. It's throwing an egg at a rock!”

“He'll lose his ribs at this rate!”

Seven, eight, nine. He took them with his teeth locked. Each time he stayed close, dragging the rag across another joint, and each time the puppet's glow grew stronger and its movements a little slower. The lye ate into the wax a drop at a time. The heat did the rest.

Gongsun Ce frowned. His fingers hesitated on the plate.

“Why is it hot on the left side?” Gongsun Ce muttered. “That's wrong. Cooling channel two should…”

Ten. A broadsword scraped past Shi Feng's neck and took a lock of his hair.

Eleven.

The puppet's fist hit him square in the chest, and Shi Feng flew back across the hall. He landed on his shoulder, rolled and came up on one knee. His chest felt like a drum somebody was playing from the inside.

[Devoured: Grade Seven puppet blow | Gain: moderate | Note: stop]

He stood.

The puppet took a step, and its right elbow stuck.

The elbow caught with a harsh scrape. The puppet tried to raise its sword, but the joint wouldn’t bend. Everyone heard it grinding.

“It's seizing!” Gongsun Ce shouted. “Who put…”

Shi Feng was already moving. He crossed the floor in three steps, caught the stuck arm at the wrist and pulled it out straight. With his other hand he drew his plain knife, put the point in the exact middle of the dry elbow seam and leaned his whole weight on the hilt.

Snap.

The arm came off. The puppet staggered. Its left shoulder, bone dry from hit six, locked solid, and the extra weight of two broken arms pulled its body to one side.

It fell over with a crash that cracked the floor slab beneath it. A cloud of sawdust rose into the lamplight. One broadsword skidded across the stone and stopped at Gongsun Ce's boot.

Even the falling sawdust seemed to stop in the air.

“Is it… dead?” someone whispered.

“It's wood. It was never alive.”

“A Grade Seven! It's a Grade Seven!”

“That was lye,” a disciple said. “I smelled lye.”

“That's cheating!”

“He took eleven hits for it!”

“…”

Gongsun Ce stared at the pile of splintered iron-wood. His mouth opened, and for a second no sound came out.

“You put furnace lye on the cooling wax!” Gongsun Ce said, furious. “You couldn’t beat the puppet straight, so you ruined its joints!”

“I had to stay inside its reach to do it,” Shi Feng said. “Nobody banned that.”

“Because no one is shameless to the extreme enough to try!” Gongsun Ce said.

“Junior Brother!” Lin Langtian's voice came from the gallery. He was draped across the rail with a potato in each hand. “That wasn't dirty! That was chemistry! Come here, I'm going to dictate.”

Zhu Liu had arrived at the foot of the stairs holding his receipt book. Lin Langtian took it out of his hands, flipped to a clean page and borrowed his brush.

“Dictate what?” Shi Feng asked.

“A bill,” Lin Langtian said. “To Prince Gongsun, for services rendered. Item one. Seven prepaid nights of array time, lost during repairs.”

“The array's cracked,” Shi Feng said. “The keeper will close it.”

“Exactly! At eighteen spirit stones a night, that's one hundred and twenty-six,” Lin Langtian said.

Shi Feng thought about it. He had paid Song Tai a bottle of Marrow-Warming Pills for each of seven nights, and each bottle was worth eighteen stones.

“That's accurate,” Shi Feng said.

“Item two. Emotional distress to Zhu Liu,” Lin Langtian said.

“Remove it,” Shi Feng said.

“Why?” Lin Langtian said.

“He's always like that,” Shi Feng said.

“I’m not always—” Zhu Liu protested, then glanced at the ruined puppet. “Never mind. Please leave that one out.”

“Item three. Medicine for the champion's bruises, six stones,” Lin Langtian said.

“Cost me three to make,” Shi Feng said.

“Write three,” Lin Langtian told Zhu Liu. “Total, one hundred and twenty-nine. Sign, Junior Brother.”

Shi Feng read the sheet twice. He checked the sum on his fingers, found no mistakes and signed at the bottom.

“Why do you sign it?” Gongsun Ce demanded. “It's not even your bill!”

“It's accurate,” Shi Feng said.

Gongsun Ce angrily checked each line. He knew the pills’ cost and counted again, hunting for an error. Lin Langtian had left him nothing false to reject.

He found nothing wrong.

Three breaths later, a jade purse landed in Zhu Liu's hands with a heavy chink.

“Receipt,” Gongsun Ce said stiffly.

“Y-yes, Prince Gongsun!” Zhu Liu said, and wrote it.

Lin Langtian beamed down from the rail.

“Remember this, Junior Brother,” Lin Langtian called. “First rule of billing. Never lie. Just count everything.”

“I'll remember,” Shi Feng said.

Behind him, the cracked floor slab gave a small creak, and Song Tai began to cry quietly into his sleeve.