Chapter 434 — The Garbage Cohort

CHAPTER 434

The Garbage Cohort

Shi Feng stepped onto the air, and the air let him down.

He landed on the Pagoda yard's flagstones for the thirteenth time that morning. Dust rose around his boots. On the wall above him, six people holding rice bowls watched in respectful silence.

“Thirteen,” Ma Liang said.

“Twelve,” Shi Feng said.

“Thirteen, Senior Brother Shi. You counted the first one as practice,” Ma Liang replied. The thin young man with ink-stained sleeves winced, remembering he was correcting his teacher. “I'm sorry.”

“You don't have to be sorry,” Shi Feng said.

“I know. I'm trying,” Ma Liang said.

On the tablet by the yard wall, three words were carved in an old, flowing hand: CLOUD LADDER STEP. It was a Golden Core-grade movement art. To use it, he had to form nine invisible stairs with his qi and climb them. Finding stable footing was proving difficult.

Three weeks he had been at it. His sword arts had come in days. His movement arts took weeks of practice, no matter how carefully he studied them.

He gathered his qi under his feet and stepped. One stair. Two. Three.

The third held. For a single breath he stood a full body-length above the flagstones, balanced on nothing, with the dawn behind him.

“He did it,” Fan Dacheng whispered from the wall. He was the oldest of the six, a heavy man of forty with a rice grain stuck to his lip. “Look at that!”

The stair gave way. Shi Feng dropped, landed and stood still.

“Entry,” Keeper Ou said from the Pagoda door. He didn't shout it. He had seen too many things this year.

Lin Langtian burst into helpless laughter on the eaves.

Lin Langtian lay along the roof ridge, kicking his boots in the air, with both hands clamped over his face. Tears ran into his hair.

“Three stairs!” Lin Langtian wailed. “A journey of a thousand li begins with a single step, and he took three weeks for three! He cleared the Nine Gates Closing tablet in six days, and he climbs a ladder like a duck!”

“It's a different art,” Shi Feng said.

“Oh, it's different! You step like you're apologising to the floor, and then the floor says no!” Lin Langtian cried.

“Could you demonstrate?” Shi Feng said.

“I—” Lin Langtian stopped. “That's not the point.”

“Then it isn't useful,” Shi Feng said, and walked over to the wall.

The six students sat up straight. They were Foundation Establishment alchemists of the outer court, between nineteen and forty years old, and the other sects had a name for them. Every Assembly, Artificer Hall sent six candidates, and six went home. In eleven years not one had come back with a 1 Mark. Their combined count of failed attempts stood at twenty-seven. The rival sects called them the garbage cohort. As the saying goes, rotten wood cannot be carved.

Three weeks ago He Zhen had brought them to the furnace hall. Shi Feng had looked at their pills for one afternoon, and then said four words. Bring me your failures.

“Yu Tie,” Shi Feng said. “What did you make?”

“A Bone-Tempering Pill,” Yu Tie said, in a small voice. He was short and square, and he had cried twice in the first week. “It's cracked in two.”

He held out a cloth. Shi Feng picked up both grey halves and swallowed them.

The students flinched. They had seen it a dozen times. They never got used to it.

“You pulled the fire back too early,” Shi Feng said. “Do it at the fourth breath, not the third. Ma Liang, what did you make?”

“A failure,” Ma Liang said at once. “It was grey and smelled of wet rope. I don't know why. I'm sorry.”

Fan Dacheng put his head in his hands.

“Every time,” Fan Dacheng muttered. “Why can't you say ‘nearly good,’ like a normal person?”

“Because it isn't,” Ma Liang said miserably.

“That's useful,” Shi Feng said.

Ma Liang blinked. Nobody had called him useful in nine years.

“Junior Brother!” Lin Langtian called, sliding down the roof tiles on his stomach and landing on both feet. The tears were still on his face, but his eyes were bright. “I brought you a present!”

“Is it a bill?” Shi Feng asked.

“It's morale! For the cohort!” Lin Langtian said.

He clapped twice. A handcart rolled through the gate, pushed by a pale errand boy. It carried one hempen sack, tied with red cord.

Lin Langtian loosened the cord.

A smell rose out of the sack, cold and green and sweet, like rain on a mountain after a long drought. The six students leaned forward without meaning to. In the doorway, even Keeper Ou took half a step.

“Nine-Vein Dew Root,” Shi Feng said slowly. “Fresh.”

“And Red Phoenix Vine, and some Silver-Frost Ginseng, because I got carried away,” Lin Langtian added, lifting out a white root. “Nascent Soul-grade, every stalk. Smell it, children. Smell it hard. That's what the real thing smells like. Then go back to your furnaces and make something worse, because you're not ready for this.”

“Senior Brother Lin,” Ma Liang said, hushed. “Where did you get it?”

“I borrowed it,” Lin Langtian said.

“Is it going back?” Ma Liang asked.

“Eventually,” Lin Langtian said.

“Then it's stolen,” Ma Liang said.

“A boy after my own heart,” Lin Langtian said.

He weighed the white root in his hand, and the loud voice dropped. His amusement faded as he studied it. For once, he seemed lost in an old memory rather than ready with another joke.

“I knew a man who grew these in his courtyard,” Lin Langtian said quietly. “Forty of them in a row. He wouldn't sell one.”

Nobody spoke.

Then Lin Langtian laughed and dropped the root back into the sack.

“The rest is for you, Junior Brother!” Lin Langtian cried. “Tonight, in the furnace hall. Make me something beyond your grade. For the cohort's morale!”

Shi Feng looked at the sack for a long moment.

He didn't ask about the courtyard.