Chapter 246 — A Friendly Arm

CHAPTER 246

A Friendly Arm

The crack carried across the whole of Three-Road Border Market.

Shi Feng had been weighing a customer's herbs. He put the scale down.

Thirty paces away, inside a square of rope and wooden stakes, an Artificer Hall disciple sat in the dust. He was holding his left arm against his chest. His forearm bent in a place where forearms didn't bend.

Over him stood a broad young man in a Martial Palace outer-court robe, shaking out his palm.

“My hand slipped!” Shen Kui announced loudly. “Don’t blame me. These friendly spars are hard to control!”

The Martial Palace side of the rope burst out laughing. Someone slapped the broad man's back. Someone else offered him a cup of rice wine, as if he'd lifted a heavy sack.

The letter read aloud in Li Changyuan's hut the night before had been very polite, so the market was polite too. One rope square. Two sects. Three exchanges a day among juniors “of equal standing.” Artificer Hall had sent six outer disciples and Cui Hong to watch over them. This was the first exchange of the morning.

“Exchange concluded,” the Martial Palace market warden announced. His name was Gui, and he held a clipboard like a man who had never been hit with one. “A friendly spar. No complaints will be recorded.”

“His arm is broken!” Cui Hong said. The gate supervisor had gone grey around the mouth.

“Accidents are part of friendship,” Warden Gui said.

“Ge Shun is early Foundation Establishment!” Cui Hong said. “Your man is at mid Foundation Establishment!”

“Both Foundation Establishment,” Warden Gui said. “Equal standing. The letter says so.”

Cui Hong opened his mouth and found nothing in it.

“Another one for the Hall!” someone jeered from the crowd. “Do they send their juniors here to be fixed?”

“They should open a clinic!”

“Shen Kui, you've never been so friendly!”

The broad man grinned and bowed to the laughter. So his name was Shen Kui.

Shi Feng picked up his medicine bag.

“Where are you going?” Sima Lan asked. She had moved the stall to the border market that morning, leaving the Salt Well Street pavement to Bo Ge's shouting, because a spar drew a crowd and a crowd drew customers. Her ledger lay open on her knee.

“To look at the arm,” Shi Feng said.

“Are you treating him?” Sima Lan asked, closing the ledger. “Then keep track of what you use. Looking isn’t the only unpaid part.”

“I've considered it,” Shi Feng said, and went.

He ducked under the rope. Nobody stopped him, because nobody on the Martial Palace side thought a pill seller was worth stopping.

The injured disciple was a smith's apprentice named Ge Shun, from the outer workshops. He was seventeen, and he was crying without a sound, which was worse than crying loudly.

“Senior Brother Shi,” Ge Shun whispered. “I didn't even touch him. I only blocked.”

“Save your breath,” Shi Feng said, kneeling beside Ge Shun. He checked the forearm carefully. Both bones were cleanly broken, but the skin was intact and he found no splinters. He’d treated worse after cart accidents.

Shi Feng thought, A palm slip would have bruised him. This was a strike aimed at the exact spot.

“Champion!” Shen Kui said. He had walked over with his sleeves rolled and his hands behind his back. “Did you come to watch? Or do you want a turn?”

“I'm a pill seller,” Shi Feng said, not looking up.

“A champion who sells pills! What a sad sect!” Shen Kui said.

“This will hurt,” Shi Feng told Ge Shun.

He gripped the wrist and the elbow, pulled once, hard and straight, and felt the bones slide home. Ge Shun screamed. The Martial Palace crowd laughed harder.

Zhu Liu had arrived at a run, carrying two stall boards. Shi Feng fixed them on either side of the arm with Zhu Liu's belt and a strip torn from his own sleeve, then put a Bone-Knitting Pill between Ge Shun's teeth.

“Swallow,” Shi Feng said.

Ge Shun swallowed. The sweat on his forehead cooled almost at once.

“It's not even sore,” Ge Shun said, astonished.

“It will be tomorrow,” Shi Feng said.

“Quick work, Champion,” Shen Kui said, his smile thinning. “The weak are meat for the strong. Tell your sect master we’ll be back tomorrow. This arm was free. I may not be so generous with the next one.”

“Is that a threat?” Zhu Liu squeaked, then looked horrified at himself.

“A friendship,” Shen Kui said, and walked away whistling.

Shi Feng watched him leave. The thick callus along his right palm explained the precision of the break. Shen Kui had practised that strike thousands of times. His hand hadn’t slipped.

“That's the one who does it on purpose,” a Martial Palace disciple muttered behind him, not quite quietly enough. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkeys, that's all this is. He did the same to a Qingquan junior last year.”

“Shh.”

“I'm only saying.”

“…”

Zhu Liu helped Ge Shun up. Cui Hong took his other side, and the two of them led him out of the ring and away from the laughing.

Sima Lan was waiting at the rope with the ledger in her hand and a stone-faced look.

“Two boards, four stones. One belt, three. One sleeve, none, as it was already torn. Pill, ten stones,” Sima Lan said. “Setting, five. Ge Shun's lost labour for thirty days, at forty copper a day, is twelve stones. Total, thirty-four.”

“Whose account?” Shi Feng asked.

“That's what I'm asking you,” Sima Lan said.

Shi Feng looked at the Martial Palace banner snapping above the rope. Then at the broad man's back, still whistling.

“The sect's, for now,” Shi Feng said.

“For now,” Sima Lan repeated. She wrote it in the margin in very small characters, and underlined it twice.