Chapter 368 — The Crack Opens

CHAPTER 368

The Crack Opens

At the sixtieth minute, the furnace gave up.

A dry crack sounded along the furnace’s shoulder. White-gold fire shot through the opening and struck the floor. The nearest finalist, furnace number eight, jumped back with a yelp.

“It's gone!” a spectator screamed.

“Furnace nine!”

“Get back! Get back from the ring!”

“It's going to blow!”

Three hundred people leaned forward at once. A few in the front row ducked behind the rail. Examiner Tao Heng, standing near the water clock, folded his hands and let his face go very still.

Shi Feng stepped forward and put his right palm over the crack.

He didn't hesitate. If he had, the fire would have chosen for him. The iron was glowing orange where his hand met it, and the stink of burning skin filled his nose at once. He ignored it. With his left hand he kept feeding the flame beneath, the slow wheat-coloured curve he'd planned, and he shut his teeth on the pain and held his breath.

Inside the furnace, nine herbs were at the dangerous hour. The aged Dew Root waited in its box on the cloth beside him. It couldn't go in yet. Thirty-one more minutes.

If the crack was allowed to widen, the furnace would lose its pressure and the pill would scatter into ash. If he closed it with ordinary qi, the qi would burn through the metal in minutes. He needed something that would take the heat and not refuse it.

Shi Feng drew qi from his core.

Mid Golden Core, a pearl of old gold, bigger than it should have been and still mostly empty. Its heat flowed up his arm. When it met the leaking fire at his palm, his Physique answered.

The All-Devouring Physique drank.

The fire that had been trying to escape the furnace went into his hand instead. It didn't burn. It tasted of cheap iron and old charcoal and something faintly sweet. It rolled up his arm, down through his core, and out again as steady heat, which he pushed into the crack from the inside. The metal shivered. The white-gold light shrank to a thread.

[Devoured: seam fire | Gain: small | Note: worth less than the hand]

“What's he doing?”

“He's blocking it with his hand!”

“His whole hand is burned! Ten fingers are tied to the heart!”

“Look at his skin. It's blistered to the wrist.”

“And the flame in the furnace hasn't even moved.”

The spectators fell quiet, stunned that he could hold the flame steady through the injury. Under his palm, the damaged iron continued to split and leak fire. Beneath it, the flame inside kept its colour. It rose and fell on a slow, even curve, as if there were nothing wrong at all.

Tao Heng's mouth tightened.

Master Ruan had stopped pretending to watch his own flame. His eyes had gone back to the burned hand and stayed there. His beard trembled. He started to say something, closed his mouth, and began again.

“That boy is mad,” Master Ruan said, to nobody. “A hand will heal. A furnace will break. Which does he think matters more? He is picking up the sesame seed and dropping the watermelon!”

His apprentice said nothing and looked at Shi Feng’s hand.

Master Ruan glared at his own flame. It had wavered. For the first time in fifty years it had wavered, because its owner had spent a breath on somebody else's hand. He fixed it with a quick flick of his sleeve. He looked furious.

Up in the gallery, Sima Lan had stopped writing.

Her brush stayed above the page. Her face was pale. She held her expression steady as she had at royal banquets, refusing to show the strangers how frightened she was. Nothing about her moved except the knuckles of her left hand, which were white on the ledger. The woman beside her, a merchant's wife eating sunflower seeds, glanced over and then quietly stopped eating.

The merchant’s wife quietly asked whether he was Sima Lan’s master.

“Employer,” Sima Lan said.

The woman asked whether he would be all right.

“He's going to be billed,” Sima Lan said, “for the hand.”

She dipped her brush. Her wrist did not shake as she wrote, which took some doing. The line read: Burned palm, right. Cause: Examiner Tao Heng's furnace, lot nine. Amount owed to Artificer Hall: to be determined. She underlined it twice.

On the floor, the minutes went by.

Seventy. Eighty. The skin on Shi Feng's palm bubbled and blackened and the Physique ate the fire as quickly as it came, so that the pain never rose above a dull, steady throb. His forehead was wet. Sweat ran down his nose and fell onto the hot iron, where it hissed.

At the ninety-first minute he took his left hand off the flame and reached for the aged root.

“It's time,” Shi Feng said under his breath.

Nobody heard him. Nobody was breathing.

He dropped the Dew Root into the furnace.

The flame inside did something no flame in the hall had done all day. It went still. Then it went dark gold, and the whole furnace rang with one deep, clear note.

Shi Feng clamped his palm harder over the seam. The hiss from the crack stopped.

He lifted his eyes. Twenty-nine minutes were left on the water clock.

At the edge of the ring, Tao Heng was no longer smiling.