Chapter 225 — One Month on His Back

CHAPTER 225

One Month on His Back

Qiu Bao arrived at the stall before the first bell.

Shi Feng noticed him on the nearly empty road just after sunrise. Qiu Bao had come alone. Without his friends behind him, he looked far less eager to draw attention. He stopped before the cracked cauldron and took a long breath.

Zhu Liu had already opened the receipt book to the right page. He didn't say a word. He just turned it around so it faced Qiu Bao.

Day three. Qiu Bao, outer court, stated: “If this stall ever makes one real pill for one real customer, this Qiu Bao will carry the cauldron for a month. Every morning. On my own back.”

Beneath it, in a different hand, someone had written: Witnessed by Lin Langtian. Spelling corrected.

“I said that,” Qiu Bao said.

“You did,” Shi Feng said.

“In front of people,” Qiu Bao said.

“Forty of them,” Zhu Liu whispered. “I counted.”

Qiu Bao looked up the road. A laundry girl was already approaching with herbs, and soon others would follow. He looked back at the cauldron. There was no chance of carrying out his promise without someone seeing him.

“This Qiu Bao keeps his word,” Qiu Bao said.

“You don't have to,” Shi Feng said.

“I know I don't have to!” Qiu Bao said. “That's why it counts!”

He squatted. He got his arms under the cauldron's rim and heaved.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. The cauldron weighed close to ninety catties, and the clay patch groaned under his grip. Qiu Bao strained until a vein rose on his forehead. At last the iron lifted from the stone, leaving him hunched beneath it.

“Careful with the patch,” Shi Feng said. “It's clay.”

“I know it's clay!” Qiu Bao said through his teeth.

He staggered four steps toward the dormitory road and stopped. Behind him, the first line of customers had arrived, and every head had turned.

“He's carrying it!”

“Qiu Bao is carrying the champion's cauldron!”

“I heard he swore a month.”

“A month? On his own back? Every morning? He lifted a rock to smash his own foot!”

“Where does he even put it down?”

“…”

“Where?” Qiu Bao gasped.

“Beside the furnace, on the flat stone,” Shi Feng said. “Where it was yesterday.”

Qiu Bao looked down. He was standing exactly four steps from the flat stone. He turned around with a groan that sounded personal and carried the cauldron back.

Sima Lan arrived in time to see him return to the stone. She paused with her slate under one arm. Qiu Bao avoided looking at her while he lowered the cauldron; he clearly expected to hear about this again.

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said.

Qiu Bao went red from his neck to his ears.

“Don't say that,” Qiu Bao muttered. “I'm still not sure you're not a fraud.”

“Fair,” Shi Feng said. “Come back tomorrow.”

“I will!” Qiu Bao said. “Obviously I will!”

He stomped away, rubbing his shoulders. Halfway down the road he realised he'd walked in the wrong direction and turned around, still without his dignity.

Zhu Liu bent over the receipt book. His shoulders were shaking.

“Are you laughing?” Shi Feng asked.

“No, Senior Brother Shi,” Zhu Liu said. “I'm correcting a figure.”

That evening the line was sixty long.

Shi Feng brewed until his arms ached. Sixty-two pills came out of the cauldron, and sixty-one went into waiting hands. One failed. He ate it in the hut with a plate of Zhu Liu's scorched sweepings, and the Ledger said what it always said.

When he came back from washing at the well, the door of his hut was unlatched.

A single lamp burned inside. On his low table lay Zhu Liu's ledger, closed. Zhu Liu himself had gone to bed hours ago, because Shi Feng had sent him.

Shi Feng opened the book.

On three pages, small marks in red ink had been added beside the black. The strokes were narrow and exact.

The first mark corrected a sum. Zhu Liu had written two spirit-stone chips too many into the day's fees. In the margin: Over by two. Don't round up for luck.

The second mark moved Fen Yue's missing pinch out of the revenue column and into a new one labelled Goodwill. In the margin: Gifts are not income.

The third mark was under Hu Tao's refund. Zhu Liu had written the stall had paid it. The red ink crossed out stall and wrote alchemist. In the margin: Loss on the alchemist. Chief Disciple Lin's wording is correct. Do not weaken it.

Shi Feng read them twice. All three corrections were right.

He recognised Sima Lan’s narrow, precise strokes. She’d checked the books without waiting to be asked, and she’d caught errors he and Zhu Liu had both missed.

She hadn't left a note. She hadn't said anything. The book lay closed in the lamplight with its red marks and nothing else.

He thought, The princess is auditing me.

Outside, someone knocked on the door.

Three knocks, neat and evenly spaced. Not the hand of someone who expected to be refused.

Shi Feng opened it. Sima Lan stood in the corridor with the dark behind her, holding a single sheet of paper folded in four. Her face gave away nothing.

“Don't speak until you've read all of it,” Sima Lan said.