Chapter 417 — Six Clouds

CHAPTER 417

Six Clouds

“A cut,” Elder Zhang Pei said. “Yesterday you said nobody cuts anything.”

“I said I need the black one,” Shi Feng said. “Yu Lan will take it.”

By midmorning on the third day, every Valley disciple well enough to walk had come to the Cauldron Court. They crowded the pillars and stone steps, leaving room for the forty-one cots under the roof’s edge. Two litters stood side by side at the back. Mu Shuyun lay on the left one, propped against cushions. Her face was grey, but she watched Shi Feng steadily.

On the stone table beside the great furnace stood the open jade box. The Heart Blossom lay in its moss, six white petals bright, the seventh black.

Elder Yu Lan picked up a silver needle. Her hand shook.

She touched the needle to the base of the seventh petal. It came away from the stem without a sound and lay in her palm like a drop of ink. The Blossom shivered. A wave of pale light ran through the six white petals, and a murmur went around the pillars.

“It's alive,” somebody whispered.

“It knows.”

“Hush!”

Shi Feng took the black petal from her palm in the tongs and walked to the furnace. Rui Ning had banked the fire to a deep, even red. Sima Lan stood at the herb table with the ledger open. Su Wanning held a tray beside her, for once not talking.

Two days. Two failures. He had eaten them both, and in the eating he had learned what no book had said.

The first pill tried to exclude the poison, which ate through its bond. He’d sealed the second more tightly and lost the medicine’s effect. The Withering remained between the ingredients in both failures. Another barrier wouldn’t remove something already inside.

So give it a door, Shi Feng thought.

The black petal carried the Withering’s memory more cleanly than soil or sap. Shi Feng had tasted the poison twice and knew how much the pill could carry. One thread would make the Withering recognise it as its own and enter. The white petals’ fragrance would complete the trap.

He set the open box on the furnace lip, so the Blossom's fragrance rode the heat. He dropped the black petal into the fire.

The furnace roared.

“Fire,” Shi Feng said.

Rui Ning fed the coals. Sima Lan began to count the breaths aloud. The herbs went in one by one in the order he had written on the board, seventeen of them, each at the breath he had set. His palm pressed to the bronze, he read the pill through the metal by touch and by sound, the way he had at Duanyang.

At the hundred and fortieth breath, the hum changed.

The furnace’s hum dropped and deepened beneath his hand. Shi Feng kept his palm against the bronze, following a slow change inside the pill. A cold thread of Withering moved through the fire toward it. The poison entered willingly, drawn to what it recognised. It reached the pill’s heart. This time the medicine was ready to hold it.

He opened the lid.

The first cloud rose, bright silver, and unrolled across the roof tiles like a banner.

“One!” a disciple cried.

The second was gold-edged. The third came in the colour of dawn, wide as the court. The fourth was green, the clean green of a new leaf, and the fifth was white, and all five hung overhead in a slow wheel while the court stared up with open mouths.

“Five clouds,” Zhang Pei said faintly. “Three days apart, one must look at a man with new eyes. At the Duanyang tower they say there were five.”

“It isn't finished,” Shi Feng said.

The sixth cloud climbed out of the furnace mouth.

It was milk-white, gold at the edges, and it smelled of a spring that had never ended. As it rose, every petal in the Heart Garden, three hundred paces away, turned toward the Cauldron Court. Those at the pillars saw a wave of colour sweep across the Eastern Terrace, lilies and peonies and even the burned bed, all leaning toward the furnace.

“Six clouds!”

“Nascent Soul-grade!”

“A 2 Mark, and six clouds!”

“…”

Shi Feng reached into the ash with the tongs and lifted out the pill. It was the size of a lotus seed, bamboo-green, with a black ring around its middle. He set it in his palm and felt its warmth. The disciples watched him carry it across the court, past the pillars, toward Mu Shuyun on the left-hand litter. Nobody stepped into his path.

“Valley Master,” Shi Feng said.

Mu Shuyun looked at the pill. Then she looked at him. She lifted her hand from the blanket, grey-nailed and slow, and took it.

She swallowed.

For three breaths nothing changed. Then the grey faded from her fingernails, from the knuckle to the tip, as if someone were wiping away a smear. Her breath came out in a long, ragged sigh. Her eyes cleared.

Mu Shuyun put her palms on the edge of the litter and pushed.

Nobody moved to help her. She hadn't stood in a month, and every soul in the court understood that no hand would be welcome.

She stood.

Her robe hung loose on her thin body. She swayed once. She straightened, tall and calm, looking out over the roof, the pillars, the garden, and the sky where six clouds were slowly turning gold.

“Hundred Flower Valley,” Mu Shuyun said, “thanks Artificer Hall.”

The roar that went up from the court shook dust from the roof.

Shi Feng's knees gave a little. A hand closed on his sleeve, quick, hidden behind his arm, and steadied him without a word.

“Cost of day three,” Sima Lan said, to nobody. “Seventeen herbs. One petal. No failures. I'll write that last part in red.”