Chapter 415 — Day One

CHAPTER 415

Day One

The pill cracked on the seventh breath.

The crack sounded through the bronze before Shi Feng saw it. Every elder beneath the roof heard it too. Grey smoke escaped the furnace mouth, carrying the smell of burned honey and wet iron. Shi Feng stopped feeding the flame.

He stopped the fire. He opened the lid.

The pill lay in the ash at the bottom, a lump the colour of a bruise, split down the middle. A black thread ran through the break and out of it, curling like a root.

“Waste,” Rui Ning whispered.

“The first one,” Shi Feng said.

“It's the first day!” Su Wanning said quickly, from the herb table. “First pills are always... it's normal! Isn't it normal? Sima Lan, isn't it normal?”

“He wasted thirteen on the night he first made a Nascent Soul-grade pill,” Sima Lan said. “One is a modest start.”

“You see? It's normal!” Su Wanning said.

“It is a ledger, not a prophecy,” Sima Lan said.

With bronze tongs, Shi Feng lifted the warm failure and turned it toward the light. Beneath the honey and iron smell was the Withering he’d tasted in the Garden weeks earlier. He examined the black thread in its split before bringing it to his mouth.

Then he put it in his mouth.

“Stop!” Elder Zhang Pei shouted.

“He's eating it!”

“It's full of the poison! That is drinking poison to quench thirst!”

“Spit it out, boy!”

“Somebody grab his jaw!”

“…”

Three elders rushed forward. Elder Yu Lan was faster than all of them, and Sima Lan moved to meet her without any hurry, one arm outstretched like a gate bar.

“He does this,” Sima Lan said.

“Does what?” Yu Lan demanded.

“Eats his failures. The pills, the metal, once an anvil,” Sima Lan said. “It's a condition. We've stopped being alarmed. Please step back from the furnace.”

“An anvil?” Yu Lan said.

“Spirit iron. Three hundred catties. It took six days,” Sima Lan said.

Yu Lan stared at her. Behind her, Elder Zhang Pei had gone the colour of old paper.

Shi Feng swallowed.

Cold spread over his tongue, down his throat and into his belly. This poison didn’t burn. Shi Feng felt it seek out his qi channels, then gather near his core, trying to take hold before his physique could devour it.

Then the Physique woke up and ate it.

[Devoured: one failure | Gain: small | Note: the poison is the hard part]

Two dozen disciples, six elders and Rui Ning stared in alarm. Even the forty-one patients on their cots turned toward him. Shi Feng opened his eyes to find nobody willing to speak first. They expected the same grey marks to appear on his hands.

“Well?” Elder Yu Lan said hoarsely. “Are you dying?”

“No,” Shi Feng said.

“Do you feel unwell?” Yu Lan said.

“Yes,” Shi Feng said. “But not from that.”

Behind him, Rui Ning let out a long breath and sat down on an upturned bucket.

“Thirty years as furnace keeper,” Rui Ning muttered. “I have eaten more salt than that boy has eaten rice, and nobody’s ever eaten a failed pill in front of me. Not even the thieves. How am I supposed to record that?”

Shi Feng washed his hands in the basin by the furnace and wrote three lines on the first page of the furnace ledger.

Day one. Fire too clean.

The poison does not sit in the pill. It sits between the herbs and eats the bond.

Something must hold the bond while the fire works.

Sima Lan read the lines over his shoulder, then took the brush from his hand and added a fourth, in her own square script.

Cost of day one: 214 stones, 3 herbs, 1 failure. Elder Zhang Pei's nerves not included.

“It isn't a cost if I eat it,” Shi Feng said.

“It's a cost if the Valley's elders can't sleep,” Sima Lan said.

The afternoon went on in the same fashion. He tried three recipes. Each one failed in a different way, one with a puff of green smoke, one with a pill that melted into a puddle, and one that came out perfectly round, perfectly white and perfectly inert, so that Su Wanning held it up in her palm and whispered, “It looks nice!”

“It's a pebble,” Shi Feng said.

He ate that one too.

By dusk the furnace was cooling and the Cauldron Court smelled of herbs and old smoke. Shi Feng sat on the lip of the bronze with his hands on his knees. He could feel the Withering in his belly, patient, dull and cold, and he could feel the Physique grinding it down, an inch at a time.

It was a different kind of poison. It wasn't made to kill quickly. It was made to be found late.

Whoever refined it knew what they were doing, he thought. Hua Rong sold a list. He never made this.

“Senior Brother Shi,” Su Wanning said. She had stopped crying, and her small face was tired. “Do you think it can be cured?”

“Yes,” Shi Feng said.

“How do you know?” Su Wanning said.

“Because it has a recipe,” Shi Feng said. “Anything with a recipe can be read.”

Su Wanning wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“Then I'll bring more tea,” Su Wanning said.

“Without honey,” Shi Feng said.

“A little honey,” Su Wanning said, and ran.