Chapter 369 — Five Clouds

CHAPTER 369

Five Clouds

“Stop the water clock!” someone shouted. “It's the last quarter!”

“You can't stop the water clock, you fool.”

“Then why is everyone staring at it?”

“Because that's furnace nine!”

Shi Feng held his position through the last twenty-nine minutes, concentrating on the pill instead of his burned hand.

The aged Dew Root was in. Beneath his palm the crack had narrowed to a thread, and the Physique had settled into a steady, quiet drinking. He did not move his feet. He did not look at the crowd. His left hand lifted and lowered over the flame in short, exact motions, a quarter-breath of qi at a time. The fire answered.

He could feel the pill forming. It was a small hard weight in the dark centre of the furnace. Around it, nine herbs were folding into each other. And the old root, pressed down at the top like a lid, kept the whole thing from boiling over.

It was a good backward recipe. It had worked perfectly twice, forty years ago, in someone else's hands.

Master Ruan's circle had said a man needed Spirit Sense to watch a pill's heart through the furnace wall. Shi Feng had none. He had his palm on the iron, and the iron told him enough: the weight of the pill in the dark, the note of the herbs folding together, the old root settling like a hand on a pot. Touch and sound gave him what the flame needed. He didn’t have Spirit Sense, and he hadn’t suddenly gained it here.

At the sixty-minute mark, Master Ruan's furnace had begun to sing. It was a sweet, rich tone, and the hall had turned to listen. Ruan stood with his chin high and his eyes closed. At the hundred-and-fifth minute his lid lifted a finger's breadth, and a pale cloud of fragrance rose over his furnace and hung there.

“One!” the hall cried together.

A second cloud followed, a little lower and a little thinner.

“Two!”

The crowd waited. The third cloud did not come. Master Ruan opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling, and the spectators waited with him, unwilling to believe the third cloud wouldn’t come.

It stayed away.

“Two,” Master Ruan said quietly, and let out a long breath. His beard shook. “Two. Closer than I've ever been.”

His apprentice hurried to praise the magnificent pill.

“It's a failed pill,” Master Ruan said. “It's a magnificent failure.”

At the hundred-and-ninth minute, the water clock ran to the last mark.

Furnace number nine was silent.

Not a hiss, not a hum. The iron had gone dark under Shi Feng's hand, and the thread of the crack had closed. Without a word, he lifted his palm. The metal came with it for a moment, stuck to the burned skin, and then dropped away.

The hall winced as one.

His right hand was black from the fingers to the wrist. Shreds of skin hung from the heel of the palm. Under it, if anyone had been close enough to see, the flesh was already closing.

Shi Feng didn't look at it. He put his left hand on the lid and lifted.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then a light, round, silver-white cloud rose from the furnace and hung under the ceiling.

“One,” a spectator said, weakly.

A second cloud rose after it. It was bright and full, and it rolled slowly over the first.

“Two!” the whole hall said.

The third rose.

“Three!” someone cried, high and cracked. “Three! That's the pass line! He's passed!”

“Shut up and count!”

The fourth rose, vast and golden at the edge, and the silver ones parted to make room for it.

A grey-haired examiner at the rail stared in disbelief. He hadn’t seen four clouds since his own apprenticeship.

“It can't be four.”

“It's four! Look at it!”

The hall was on its feet. Dried plums bounced on the stone. A merchant knocked his cushion over the rail and a Pavilion attendant caught it without looking.

And the fifth cloud came out of the furnace slowly, as if it had been waiting for the others to finish. It was wide as a table. It was the colour of dawn.

“Five…”

“Having eyes, and failing to see Mount Tai…”

The next cheer caught in the spectators’ throats. They were too shocked to finish it.

Five clouds. A Nascent Soul-grade pill, refined in a cracked furnace, by a Golden Core cultivator, with his hand on the seam.

The white-robed attendants stood frozen with their trays. On the second tier, a bald man dropped his fan. Beside the water clock, an old examiner had gone green. Tao Heng kept his hands behind his back, clenching them hard enough to whiten the knuckles.

“That's not possible,” Tao Heng said, quietly.

Shi Feng looked into the furnace.

Inside lay a single pill, the size of a lotus seed, polished, pale as old jade, with a thin gold ring around its middle. It was warm and pure, and the fragrance rolling off it made his core hum.

He picked it up with his left hand, tilted his head and examined it. Then he put it in the Pavilion's jade dish.

“Done,” Shi Feng said.

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. The clouds drifted slowly toward the ceiling and thinned.

Then, in the second tier, Sima Lan lifted her brush. She drew a line across the page, then another, and then she wrote a figure so small that the merchant's wife beside her had to lean over to read it.

Five clouds, it said. Tower owes: one furnace, one hand.