Chapter 374 — Same Price

CHAPTER 374

Same Price

By the fifth bell, the queue for the causeway ran back past three hundred tents.

A road of flat black stones led out across the shallows to a bare rock in the middle of the lake. On the rock stood a grey arch, taller than a house, with a round seal set into it. Wardens in white sashes stood at the near end of the causeway and checked each entrant's token against a list. The ash rain had stopped completely in the centre. Everywhere else it still drifted down and settled on shoulders.

Artificer Hall stood in a line of twelve. Shi Feng had Sima Lan on his left and her ledger on his arm. She had counted the people ahead of them twice and refused to say what she'd concluded.

“Move up, move up,” Cheng Kuo shouted from the Palace column. “Artificer Hall to the back. Twelve slots is a rounding error.”

His name was Cheng Kuo. He was a heavy young man in a crimson robe, mid Foundation Establishment, with a gold-pillar badge pinned crooked on his chest. He walked down the line with his hands on his hips, a fox borrowing the tiger's might, and when he reached the end, where the youngest of the nine inner-court seniors stood holding her token in both hands, he put one palm on her shoulder and pushed.

Yao Min was seventeen. She fell off the edge of the road onto the wet ash, and her token slid out of her hand into the mud.

“Oops,” Cheng Kuo said, and several of his friends laughed. “The stones are slippery. Be careful.”

Shi Feng stepped out of the line.

He didn't hurry. He crouched, wiped the token on his sleeve and gave it back to Yao Min. Her palm was scraped raw, so he put a small jar of ointment in her other hand. Then he stood up.

“Sima Lan,” Shi Feng said.

“Ready,” Sima Lan said. She already had the ledger open and her chalk ready.

“Shoving an entrant. Three stones,” Shi Feng said. “Delaying the line. Two. Mud on a Hall robe. One. Treatment for the palm. Four.”

“Ten,” Sima Lan said. “Plus one for the argument. Eleven.”

“You want me to pay eleven stones for a push?” Cheng Kuo demanded, staring at the ledger.

“For shoving her off the road,” Shi Feng replied. “You can see the scrape on her hand.”

The Martial Palace line had gone quiet. A few of the disciples near the front looked at Shi Feng's face. Then, one by one, they looked down, and their hands crept to their sleeves and covered their storage rings.

“Rule three doesn't apply,” Shi Feng said. “This isn't a spar. I'm not asking for a deposit. Eleven stones, now.”

“I won't—” Cheng Kuo began.

The whole Martial Palace column took one step back.

Cheng Kuo's face went red, and then white. He dug out a pouch and counted eleven stones into Sima Lan's palm with fingers that wouldn't stay steady.

“Receipt,” Sima Lan said.

“What?” Cheng Kuo asked, still shaken.

“You'll want one,” Sima Lan said, and wrote it.

“He actually paid!”

“Eleven stones for a shove?”

“That's cheap. Last time it was a hundred.”

“Who told him to touch the girl? He kicked an iron plate!”

“…”

Shi Feng heard light footsteps on the stones and turned.

Hundred Flower Valley had arrived while the crowd was watching. A line of white carriages stood at the rear of the camp, petal pennants hanging wet and limp in the ash. Thirty disciples in pale green sashes were coming down the road at a brisk walk. At the front, one woman had stepped out of the line and was walking toward him alone.

Ling Qingzhu wore her violet inner robe under the Valley's green, with the white veil lowered. She stopped three paces away and looked at the eleven stones in Sima Lan's hand, and then at him.

Her thumb pressed once against the edge of her sleeve.

“You've changed,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Same price,” Shi Feng said.

“That isn’t an answer,” Ling Qingzhu said, tilting her head.

“It's the price,” Shi Feng said. “For anyone who touches one of mine. I'd have charged you too.”

Behind her, Su Wanning made a small, strangled sound and clutched the sash of the disciple beside her. “Same price! Did you hear that?” Su Wanning gasped. “He said same price! Big Sis, he said—”

“Wanning,” Ling Qingzhu said, very softly.

“Mmph,” Su Wanning muttered, swallowing the rest of her teasing.

Ling Qingzhu looked at him a moment longer. The veil hid her mouth, but not the faint colour at the edge of her ear. She turned away.

“Then I'll be careful where I stand,” Ling Qingzhu said over her shoulder.

“Please do,” Shi Feng said.

His thumb had found the violet string on his purse. He moved it away and joined his line.

A deep note rolled across the water.

It started in the stones under the causeway and rose through the soles of everyone's feet. The round seal in the arch glowed, white first, then gold. Slowly, from the centre outward, it opened, with a long grinding sound, and a pillar of pale light stood in the gap. Ash swirled around it in a ring.

“The seal!”

“It's open!”

A warden shouted for the entrants to form up.

Shi Feng glanced back at the shore, where the elders had gathered. He looked for the loud one, because the loudest voice on the shore ought to have said something by now.

Lin Langtian stood at the water's edge with a sweet potato forgotten in his hand.

He wasn't looking at the crowd. He was looking at the arch, and his face had no expression on it at all. It wasn't a sulk. It wasn't a grin. He stared at the open arch with an expression Shi Feng couldn’t read. Whatever he was thinking, it had silenced every complaint.

For once, Lin Langtian said nothing.