Chapter 511 — The Pill

CHAPTER 511

The Pill

They laid him on the floor of the driver's porch, under a lacquered awning, and the rain stopped touching him.

Lanxin tucked a folded cloak beneath his head. Yuzhu stood well back with her umbrella. She held his Sword at arm's length with two fingers. Somebody had gone down into the mud and fetched it.

“Lanxin,” the voice said, from behind the screens. “The lotus-heart pill. The blue box.”

“Miss?” Yuzhu said. Her umbrella shook. “That's the one for...”

“I know what it's for.”

Yuzhu shut her mouth.

Lanxin returned with a small blue porcelain box. The single pill inside was longan-sized and lotus-leaf green, with a faint pearl sheen. Shi Feng caught its scent as soon as she lifted the lid: clean water, something cold, and a warmer scent beneath it that reminded him of newly boiled rice.

Shi Feng had been an alchemist for long enough to read a smell like a page. He found a lotus seed, a snow-bamboo root he knew only from books and a river-pearl dust. He counted nine herbs. He couldn't name the other two.

The pill’s maker was far beyond him. It was perfectly round, without a seam. The qi folded inside it was so smooth that it didn’t ripple. Even lying injured on the porch, Shi Feng could recognise that degree of control.

That was a better pill than any he had made.

Lanxin put it on his tongue and pressed his jaw closed.

“It'll melt,” Lanxin said. “Don't fight it.”

He didn't.

It dissolved like snow on a stove. Warmth ran down his throat, into his chest, into his stomach. For one long moment nothing happened. Then it went to work.

His cracked bones drew together. Then the torn meridians began to close, one after another. Shi Feng followed the changes in disbelief: forty breaks became thirty, then twenty, then none. Feeling returned to his legs and arms. Blood rushed into his fingers so strongly that it hurt, but he could move them again.

The Ledger flickered.

[Healed: bones, meridians. Not healed: face.]

He lay there, shaking, as the last of the pain bled out through his skin.

It had taken less than the burning of a stick of incense. Every other pill he had ever swallowed took days.

“Is he whole?” the voice asked.

“His arms move, miss,” Lanxin said. “He's sitting up. Look at him.”

“I'm not looking,” the voice said, with no impatience at all. “I am listening to you describe it.”

Shi Feng sat up.

His left hand rose to his cheek on its own.

His fingertips met a hard, puckered ridge running from his left brow to his jaw. The eyebrow was gone. His eyelid dragged, and the left corner of his mouth stayed drawn up. He pressed it down with his thumb. It pulled upward again as soon as he let go.

The left half of his face was still wrong.

“It's the soul-fire,” the voice said gently. “The pill mends flesh and bone and meridian. It can't touch what soul-fire has burned. That isn't mine to mend, young sir. I'm sorry.”

“It's enough,” Shi Feng said.

His voice came out rough and clear. It was his own voice, and it worked.

“Is it?” the voice said.

“I can walk,” Shi Feng said. “I came here unable to.”

A short silence. The lanterns hummed.

“Then it's enough,” the voice said. “Yuzhu. Wrap his face. He shouldn't take the night air on it.”

Yuzhu wrapped his face with a strip of grey cloth, keeping as far away as she could. She used two fingers and complained under her breath about burning her dress afterward. Lanxin ignored the complaint. When the wrapping was finished, Shi Feng could see through only one eye.

He didn't complain. He bowed his head to the closed door.

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said.

The voice didn't answer. Perhaps she had decided it needed no reply.

“Up,” Matron Yue said.

She had stepped down from the driver's bench. Her feet made no noise in the mud. She took him by the collar, not roughly, and set him on the outer bench behind her seat, where a servant's trunk usually rode, open to the sky but sheltered by the roof's edge.

“Sit still,” Matron Yue said. “Face the road. Don't look at the curtains. Don't look at the door.”

“Understood,” Shi Feng said.

“We're not being cruel,” Matron Yue said. “It's a rule. A strict one.” She said nothing more.

The carriage lifted.

The road dropped away beneath his boots, and the dark hills slid backward. The air grew thin and cold, and the smell of the pill faded into the smell of the sky. Matron Yue took the reins. A moment later Shi Feng felt it.

He had no Spirit Sense. He didn't need it.

The stillness around Matron Yue didn’t crush him. The wind and rain slid around her as the carriage moved through the clouds. Shi Feng remembered his master at the gate, sweeping away the Palace Master’s pressure. What he felt now was the same size. Neither seemed to need to strain at all.

Wanting nothing.

Half a step, Shi Feng thought.

He kept his face to the road and his hand away from his cheek. He did not say it aloud. His master had told him not to sell it.

But he looked at the grey back in front of him and understood, slowly and completely, that the old woman who drove this carriage stood where Li Changyuan stood. And that she was only the driver.