Chapter 439 — Lot Sixty

CHAPTER 439

Lot Sixty

“Lot nine,” Hui Cang announced. “A three-hundred-year Violet Marrow Root, Nascent Soul-grade, with its own jade box. We begin at nine thousand.”

“Nine thousand!” a merchant shouted at once.

“Ten!”

“Eleven!”

Shi Feng sat in the fourth row of the Sky Pavilion's tower hall with a jade bidding tag in his lap. It was numbered seventeen. He had not raised it once.

The hall was round, with a glass dome over it and six hundred cushioned seats climbing the walls in rings. Pavilion wardens in white stood at every pillar. High on the balconies, the great sects had their boxes. The Valley's was draped in green. The Martial Palace's was draped in red, and it was the largest of them all.

“Lesson eighteen,” Lin Langtian said, from the seat beside him. He was peeling a sweet potato with great concentration. “Never bid first. Never bid last. Bid when the loudest man coughs.”

“Why?” Shi Feng asked.

“Because the loudest man always coughs when he is out of money,” Lin Langtian said. “Watch him. The one in the blue hat.”

Shi Feng watched. The man in the blue hat shouted twelve thousand, coughed, and sat down with a red face.

“Twelve thousand, going once,” Hui Cang called. “Twice. Sold.”

Sima Lan, on his other side, made a small mark on her slate.

“Have you found anything we can actually use?” Shi Feng asked.

“Not at these prices,” Sima Lan replied. “And none of it needs repairing. We came to the wrong sort of sale. Sit up; you're blocking my view.”

He sat up.

“That's Peng Yan,” Lin Langtian said, nodding upward without looking. “In the red box, the thin one, beside the grey-robed old man. The treasurer. He's counting how much you cost them.”

Shi Feng raised his eyes. Wei Chengyuan sat at the front of the Martial Palace's box in an unremarkable grey robe, with his hands folded over his stick. Beside him, Elder Qu Jiang stroked his long beard. Behind them, a lean man with an abacus in his lap moved the beads in a steady rhythm and never once looked down.

“He's accurate,” Shi Feng said.

“He can count perfectly and still lose,” Lin Langtian replied cheerfully. “All it takes is Wei Chengyuan deciding he must have something.”

In the Valley's box, a pale woman in a deep green sash was sitting very straight. Mu Shuyun looked thinner than he remembered, but she held her head high, and when her eyes met his across the hall she bowed. It was a very small bow. Beside her, Ling Qingzhu pretended to study her catalogue with great interest and did not raise her eyes at all.

“Lot twelve,” Hui Cang announced. “A second-hand Golden Core-grade furnace, three legs, cracked at the…”

“Three legs,” Gongsun Ce murmured from the row behind. “It's your type.”

“Quiet,” Shi Feng said.

Behind them, two Pavilion assistants waited beside a pillar with trays of tea. They spoke quietly, trusting the auction noise to cover them.

One asked why Hongye Kingdom had sent nobody to the Assembly, not even a clerk. The other repeated the official excuse: the road was too long.

Neither believed it. One muttered that fame brings trouble, as a fat pig fears the butcher.

They were frightened of what happened to Hongye's last 2 Mark alchemist. Last spring, the man had been invited to this same Assembly. He was in his seventies, and forty witnesses saw him walking along his own street with his apprentice.

Then he stepped upward.

There was no stair. No flying artifact appeared beneath his foot. He took that single step into the air and vanished.

The assistants agreed on every detail. No body was found. No sign explained where he went. His apprentice still swept the shop each morning because the master would want it clean when he returned.

A warden turned toward their whispering and ordered them to stop. Both assistants fell silent at once. One stared down at his tray, suddenly afraid of saying more.

Nobody near the pillar laughed. Even the closest merchants had stopped their conversation to listen.

Shi Feng sat very still.

He had heard the story once already, at the stall, from a gossiping merchant. It hadn't changed in the retelling. That was the part he disliked. Strange stories usually grew with the telling. This one had stayed exactly the same size.

Shi Feng thought, A man who steps into the air. A 2 Mark. And now I'm one too.

He filed it. He didn't know where it belonged yet, only that he wouldn't forget it.

“Your face,” Sima Lan said quietly.

“What about it?” Shi Feng asked.

“You haven't moved since they mentioned Hongye,” Sima Lan said quietly. Her chalk paused. “Do you want me to write any of it down?”

“Not yet,” Shi Feng said.

“Then I'll remember it for you,” Sima Lan said, and she did not ask what it was.

The sales went on. A Wind-Step Talisman went for four thousand, a book of broken sword forms for six hundred, a pair of jade chopsticks that a merchant swore had belonged to a general for eleven. Shi Feng bought none of it. Lin Langtian bought nothing either, and described each lot's faults loudly, so that three bidders dropped out. Gongsun Ce kept his odds board running in a corner and quietly took bets on how many lots would sell before noon.

By the second hour the hall had grown warm. A warden passed out the final catalogue page, and Zhu Liu took it, read it, and went still.

“Senior Brother Shi,” Zhu Liu said.

“What is it?” Shi Feng asked.

“Lot sixty,” Zhu Liu whispered. “The star lot. ‘A Pill of the Lost Era. Size of a quail's egg. Black. Origin: a scrap dealer's cart, sold without a name.’”

Shi Feng took the page from his hand and read it once. Then he gave it back.

“Don't say anything,” Shi Feng said.

“I wasn't going to,” Zhu Liu said. He had already opened his receipt book. He turned a page, and then he turned it back.