Chapter 248 — The Deposit

CHAPTER 248

The Deposit

By midmorning the rope square at Three-Road Border Market was ringed six people deep.

Hawkers sold roasted chestnuts to the crowd. On the Martial Palace side, Jia Tong waited in his spotless robe with a refined saber on his hip. He was at late Foundation Establishment, and he stood the way men stood when they'd never been surprised.

“Rule three,” Jia Tong said, and set his storage ring on the warden's stool. “The deposit.”

Shi Feng stepped up and set a ring beside it.

It was a plain grey ring that Sima Lan had handed him at dawn without comment. Forty stones of copper, she'd said, and Zhu Liu's old receipts. Nobody on the mountain had ever tried to steal either.

“Is that all the champion carries?” Jia Tong asked, smiling.

“It's what I'm putting down,” Shi Feng said.

The Martial Palace crowd laughed. Warden Gui raised his clipboard.

“Begin!” Warden Gui said.

Jia Tong's saber left its sheath in one clean line.

Shi Feng stepped back, and the blade whistled past his chest. The second stroke caught his sleeve. The third he took on his forearm, and the force went through the bone and into the hungry part of him that had been waiting for it.

[Devoured: saber strike | Gain: small | Note: tastes of manners]

“He's not even dodging!” a girl shouted from the Hall side.

“He's soaking it!”

“He's going to lose his arm!”

“It's the champion! He can take it!”

“…”

Jia Tong's face tightened. The fourth blow hit Shi Feng across the ribs, and the fifth rang off his shoulder blade. The golden bones under his skin took each strike and gave back nothing. Only the cloth tore. Shi Feng stayed where he was and let him swing.

Shi Feng thought, His footwork’s clean, and he commits to every cut. He expects each hit to move me. When it doesn’t, he has to start the next stroke from the wrong position.

“Why won't you fall?” Jia Tong said. His breath had begun to catch.

“I'm still counting,” Shi Feng said.

“Counting what?” Jia Tong said.

“Your openings. There were three,” Shi Feng said.

Jia Tong roared and put everything into one overhead cut. The refined saber came down in a bright arc, and Shi Feng's left hand came out of his sleeve holding a dull grey ingot the length of a man's hand.

He lifted it above his head like a paperweight.

The saber hit the Slag Weight.

There was a thin, bright sound, like a small bell. Then the top half of the saber spun away end over end and stuck in the dust beside the warden's stool.

Jia Tong stared at the broken saber. The cut was clean. He’d brought a refined artifact into this spar, and half of it now stood in the dirt beside the stool.

“My blade!” Jia Tong said. “That was a refined artifact!”

“It was a blade,” Shi Feng said. “Do you concede?”

“It's a rock!” Jia Tong said.

“Then don’t strike it again,” Shi Feng said. “Do you concede?”

Jia Tong looked at the grey stone in Shi Feng's palm, then at the Palace crowd gone silent behind him. His shoulders fell.

“I concede,” Jia Tong said.

The Hall side exploded.

“A rock cut a refined artifact!”

“Did you see that? Did anyone see that?”

“He won with a paperweight!”

“Where did Artificer Hall find him?”

“Crouching tiger, hidden dragon! They were hiding him all along!”

Warden Gui lowered his clipboard slowly. Zhu Liu was already at the stool, pulling the two rings toward him, holding his receipt book against his chest like a shield. He tipped out Jia Tong's ring, which the loser had unsealed himself as the rule required, and began to read aloud.

“Deposit received, item one. Forty-two spirit stones,” Zhu Liu said. “Item two, three bottles of Qi Gathering Pills, labelled. Item three, one jade comb, broken. Item four, one cleaning cloth for a saber. Item five…”

He stopped. He had unfolded something.

“What is it?” Shi Feng asked.

“An unsent letter,” Zhu Liu said, unfolding it. “Senior Sister Qiu of Hundred Flower Valley. ‘Since the day you passed me the lantern at the gate, I have thought of nothing…’” His face changed. “I’m sorry! I thought I was still reading the inventory!”

The crowd had gone dead quiet. Then someone laughed, and then everyone did. Jia Tong's face went the colour of a boiled crab.

“Give that back,” Jia Tong said, in a voice that cracked in the middle.

Shi Feng took the letter from Zhu Liu's shaking hand. He looked at it for a moment. Then he folded it along its old creases, walked across the ring, and held it out.

“Personal correspondence isn't a deposit,” Shi Feng said. “Remove it from the list.”

“Removed,” Zhu Liu whispered, and crossed it out.

Jia Tong accepted it with both hands and lowered his head. He couldn’t bring himself to thank Shi Feng in front of the crowd. Behind him, Martial Palace disciples stopped laughing. Several looked uncomfortably toward the rings on their own hands.

Zhu Liu produced a small card, cream-coloured, written in Lin Langtian's flourish. Shi Feng set it against Jia Tong's chest, where it stuck to the sweat.

Thank you for the friendly spar. Your deposit is received with gratitude. Artificer Hall.

Shi Feng walked off the rope with his sleeve torn and a bruise forming under his arm.

A Martial Palace disciple in an outer-court badge stopped him at the edge of the crowd. He had a saber on his back and a face like a closed shop.

“This is disgraceful,” Duan Yichen said loudly, folding his arms. “A paperweight against a refined artifact. Unworthy of a champion.”

“Noted,” Shi Feng said.

“Very strongly noted,” Duan Yichen said, and as he turned to go, a slip of paper dropped from his sleeve into Shi Feng's hand. “Disgraceful.”

Shi Feng unfolded it when he was alone. Two lines, small and neat.

Zhong Bo tomorrow. He knows about the rock. Shen Kui last: he will come angry.