Chapter 509 — The Ditch

CHAPTER 509

The Ditch

The rain didn't stop for a night and a day.

Shi Feng counted it, because counting was the only work left. The ditch water rose to his collar, fell, rose again. His legs stayed numb. His left hand answered when he told it to close, but his right only twitched. Whenever he tried to draw qi, the pain came before the qi did.

He stopped trying at dawn.

Once, in the grey hours, a flat line slid across his mind.

[Core: near-full. Meridians: torn in forty places. Bones: cracked. Condition: bad. Note: stay awake.]

He read it twice. It was the most honest thing anyone had said to him in a day.

He stayed awake.

The cold brought back Qingshi Town. Shi Feng remembered the eastern courtyard and the ration bowl at its door. The person setting it down wouldn’t look at him. A boy said it was a shame about the Shi family’s eldest grandson. There was no malice in that voice, only certainty that he was finished.

Ruined, the word had said. Ruined, ruined, ruined.

Shi Feng lay in the mud and listened to it again.

For three years, he’d fought to prove that word wrong. The arena, the Pagoda, even his invoices were answers to it. He’d never told anyone how much he feared being helpless again. He wouldn’t say it aloud now, either. Nobody was here to listen but the rain.

He was afraid. Not of the word itself, but of waking every day unable to change what others had decided he was. That was the life he thought he’d escaped.

Not again, he thought. Not like this.

The thought gave him no strength, but he held on to it. He couldn’t let himself accept the ditch as the place where his life would end.

Toward noon, he heard a wheel.

It was an ordinary wheel on an ordinary road. He turned his head to the sound, and it took everything he had. An ox cart came over the rise, hauling a load of wet cabbages and a farmer with a straw rain cape. The ox walked with its head low. The farmer saw the ditch and pulled the ox up so sharply that the cabbages shifted.

“Heavens,” the farmer said. “Is that a person?”

Shi Feng opened his mouth. What came out was a dry sound.

The farmer got down. He was a broad man of fifty with a dark, weathered face, and he walked to the edge of the road with his hand on a short knife. He looked at the robe, at the blood dried black along the sleeve and at the grey sword lying in the mud a body's length away.

“Cultivator's gear,” the farmer said. “Cultivator's blood, too. That's a bad kind of blood to find on a road.”

He didn't come closer.

“Water,” Shi Feng said. It was barely a word.

The farmer hesitated until he saw Shi Feng’s face. Then his expression changed. He shut his mouth and stepped back, pulling his hand away from the knife to press it against his chest. Shi Feng saw fear, not disgust.

“Soul-fire,” the farmer whispered. “That's soul-fire. That's the Empire's kind of burn. When immortals fight, it's the mortals who suffer.” He backed another step. “I've got a wife and three girls. I can't. I'm sorry. You understand? I can't carry that home.”

Shi Feng understood. He closed his eyes and didn't argue.

The farmer stood for a long breath. Rain dripped off the edge of his cape.

Then he took a gourd from his belt, pulled the stopper with his teeth and set it on the road, right at the lip of the ditch. He put a flat cake beside it and wiped his palm on his coat.

“It's what I have,” the farmer said. “Don't die on my road.”

He climbed back onto the cart. He didn't look again. The ox plodded on, and the wheel's sound shrank into the rain.

Shi Feng looked at the gourd.

It sat a body's length above him, on the packed earth. He lifted his left hand. It moved a finger's width and fell. He tried again. A little more. His fingers scraped the mud and found a root.

If he stayed in the ditch, nobody would see him.

He didn't say so aloud. He only began to pull.

It took a long time. His elbow dragged him a hand's width, then a forearm's, then a hand's again. The mud sucked at his robe. Twice he stopped and lay with his face against the slope, shaking, and the Ledger said nothing because there was nothing worth saying. On the third try he reached the gourd, knocked it into his chest and drank in small, hard swallows. The water tasted of clay and ox and rain.

It was the best thing he had ever drunk.

Shi Feng dragged himself out of the ditch and onto the road’s edge. He lay on his back with rain pouring into his eyes. He was still weak and exposed, but a passing traveller could see him here. In the ditch, he could have died without anyone noticing.

The afternoon went dim beneath the clouds.

Somewhere above the rain, the air began to hum. It wasn't thunder, and it wasn't wind.

It was close to the sound the three white robes had made when they left him.

Something large was coming down.