Chapter 281 — That Toad Ate My Bracelet

CHAPTER 281

That Toad Ate My Bracelet

“For your recovery,” Lin Langtian said, and dropped a bundle of herbs into Shi Feng's lap.

It was dusk on Camp Ridge. The rain had thinned to a grey drizzle, and the cohort sat in a tight ring under the sheet with their blankets pulled up to their noses. Qiu Bao sat to one side with his cauldron set up on its three bell-legs, dented and furious, and a small fire under it.

Shi Feng had secured the heart in his ring. His left arm had stopped buzzing, but Sima Lan had bound his burned right palm tightly in a spare sash. She looked angry each time he tried to move it.

“Rest,” Sima Lan had said, and then, with no change of tone, “Don't use that hand.”

He looked at the herbs. Three of them he knew. Two he'd only read about in Lin Langtian's notes.

“Nascent Soul-grade,” Shi Feng said.

“A tiny one!” Lin Langtian said. “A restoration pill. It's practically a cough sweet.”

“It isn't,” Shi Feng said.

Sima Lan, across the fire, wrote something in her ledger and underlined it twice.

Shi Feng set the herbs in the cauldron and fed the fire with his left hand. It took him an hour. The pill rose from the liquid twice, almost whole, and fell apart twice, with a thin wet crack. The third time, a dull black lump the size of a chestnut bounced across the bottom of the cauldron and rolled onto the cloth.

Waste. It smelled of burnt tea and pepper.

Shi Feng reached for it. A long pink tongue shot past his fingers, snapped round the lump and vanished.

He looked at his empty hand.

On the cloth beside the cauldron sat the toad from the hollow. It had followed him all the way back through the rain, hopping a step behind, and Zhu Liu had decided it was a stray and given it a bowl of water. Now it swallowed, shut its gold-rimmed eyes and shuddered from head to foot.

Its skin turned a shade darker, and a faint orange glow ran beneath it and faded.

“That was my dinner,” Shi Feng said.

“It ate your failure,” Zhu Liu said, awed.

“Nascent Soul-grade waste!” Lin Langtian said, leaning closer in fascination. “Look at its colour! Junior Brother, something’s finally beaten you to your own failed pill. Don’t let it have the whole batch.”

“I'm writing it down,” Zhu Liu said.

“What are you calling it?” Wen Bo asked.

“Old Soot,” Zhu Liu said. “Sir. Madam. I don't know.”

“Old Soot,” Lin Langtian agreed.

The toad hopped across the cloth, onto a boot, up a skirt and onto Sima Lan's knee.

Sima Lan froze. She stared down at the warty creature on her skirt, visibly disgusted. The toad gazed back at her as if it had found exactly where it belonged.

“Get it off my knee,” Sima Lan said. “Now. Before it decides to climb any farther.”

Nobody did. Old Soot gazed up at her with deep and devoted eyes, then shot out its tongue a second time. It wrapped round her left wrist and tugged.

There was a small, bright click.

The tongue withdrew. The toad's throat bulged once. Something round and green glinted inside the pale skin, and then it was gone.

Sima Lan stared at her wrist. Where her jade bracelet had been, the sleeve lay flat.

“That toad,” Sima Lan said, with a calm so complete it made Wu Qiang edge away, “just ate my bracelet.”

“It's a lucky toad,” Lin Langtian said weakly.

“It was worth four hundred stones,” Sima Lan said.

“Ah,” Lin Langtian said. “Then it's an expensive toad.”

Shi Feng lifted Old Soot off her knee with his good hand, dropped it into the cauldron and clapped the lid down. The toad hit the lid from underneath, once. Then it went silent, and a smell of warm metal drifted up.

“Hold still,” Shi Feng said.

“I wasn't moving,” Zhu Liu said.

“I meant the toad,” Shi Feng said.

Footsteps squelched up the slope.

Shen Ji came out of the rain with six retainers. He no longer wore the gold-threaded collar of the morning, but a plain dark robe, and he kept to the edge of the firelight, as if he disliked what it did to him.

“Chief Disciple Lin,” Shen Ji said. He bowed an exact inch. “The hollow is empty. The Thunderhide was a reserved beast. The Palace's permit office keeps a roll of such things.”

“Ours doesn't,” Lin Langtian said happily. “We only keep potatoes.”

“Someone killed it,” Shen Ji said. “The heart is Palace property. A commoner is innocent, yet guilty for the jade he holds. You have two choices. Hand it over, or compensate us at the market rate of ten thousand spirit stones.”

“Ten thousand?” Sima Lan said. Her chalk had stopped. “For a bull?”

“For a Golden Core-grade heart,” Shen Ji said.

“What heart?” Lin Langtian said. “Zhu Liu, do we have a heart?”

Zhu Liu turned back several pages. “No heart, Senior Brother Lin,” Zhu Liu said. “There's a toad.”

Shen Ji's gaze slid over the camp and stopped on the cauldron.

It was steaming. A thin line of orange light leaked out round the lid. Shen Ji only nodded at his nearest retainer, a large man with a scar across his nose, who stepped forward and kicked the cauldron over.

The lid flew off.

Old Soot sat up in the spilled brew. It took in the retainer, the robe, the scar and the six faces behind him. Then it opened its mouth, and a stream of glowing slag shot across the ridge.

It hit Shen Ji dead in the chest. His robe burst into flame.

“My robe!” Shen Ji screamed, and rolled in the mud.

The retainers rushed to help Shen Ji, shouting over one another. One smacked the burning robe with his sleeve and set that alight too. He fled after the others. They had come to steal the chicken and had lost a handful of rice besides. Old Soot burped and settled on Sima Lan’s boot, pleased with itself.

Lin Langtian wiped his eyes with a potato.

“Does the Palace's permit,” Lin Langtian called after the fleeing men, “cover assault on a Great Sect elder's cauldron?”