Chapter 520 — Column Nine

CHAPTER 520

Column Nine

“Entry is two stones,” Zhu Liu said. “The funeral deposit is one more. It's refundable. I wrote it down.”

“You wrote it down last time,” Shi Feng said.

“I'm consistent,” Zhu Liu said, and burst into tears.

The Flame Cavern breathed hot air over the crowd, as it had for three hundred years. Beside the entrance, the stone board stood with its nine columns. Names crowded the first four columns, and Gongsun Ce's stood alone in the sixth. Shi Feng's own sat in the fourth, carved shallowly, with a small, accurate note beside it: Decent.

The ninth column was bare.

By dawn the sect was already there. Two hundred outer-court disciples sat on the black glass slope with their buns. The elders had brought stools. Warden Mu Gang poured tea with the calm of a man who had seen a great many people go in.

By noon, the other candidates had finished. Dou Hai emerged from ring four, sulking beneath singed eyebrows. Sun Lei and Xi Wen supported each other out of ring three. Only three of the fourteen carried ring-five tallies: Pei Gang, visibly shaken; the quiet Lu Heng; and seventeen-year-old Yao Min. She raised hers with both hands, her braid swinging, and someone threw her a bun.

“Ring five!”

“A girl, at seventeen! Heroes come from the young!”

“Senior Brother Pei nearly cried!”

“I did not,” Pei Gang said hoarsely.

Shi Feng went in last.

He did not hurry. He passed the first ring and put out his left hand toward the red channel running along the floor, no wider than a palm. The fire licked at his fingers, thin and orange. He waited.

It came in.

He felt it travel up the arm and settle somewhere under the ribs, warm and obedient. The Physique drank, exactly as it always had.

Shi Feng stood still for a breath longer than necessary.

[Devoured: ring one fire | Gain: small | Note: still hungry]

In the ditch ten days ago, the soul-fire lamp had burned him without feeding the Physique. Since then, Shi Feng had worried it might have damaged more than his face. He couldn’t examine that ability from outside. Before pushing deeper into the cavern, he needed to know whether ordinary fire still fed him.

He walked on, past ring two and ring three. At ring five the heat leaned on his skin like a hand, and the Physique ate it. At ring six the walls began to run. At ring seven, the elders' line, a chalk mark on the floor ahead of him read Beyond this, ask permission, and had been scratched through by someone.

He stepped over it.

The fire grew louder. By the eighth ring the air tasted of iron. He found the dusty green tally from the last time on its stone shelf. His own thumbprint still sat in the dust. He did not touch it. He did not need to.

Ring nine opened into a long, low chamber of silent white light. Liquid fire ran along its middle. Beside it stood a high-backed black stone chair on a flat slab, with a cushion embroidered in two letters. A teapot sat on the channel. Sweet-potato skins littered the chair’s base. Shi Feng recognised who’d made himself comfortable here.

A scrap of paper was pinned under the teapot.

Do not sit. Chair is occupied. — L.

Shi Feng read it twice. Then he looked past the chair at the far wall, where a single jade tally the colour of old blood hung on a hook.

Nobody had ever touched it. The board had been waiting a hundred years for a name.

He thought, Eight was my own record. And the fire had stopped being hot at seven. He walked around the chair, reached up and took the tally down.

It was warm. It hummed once against his fingers, and the whole cavern seemed to listen.

[Devoured: ring nine fire | Gain: moderate | Note: polite, compared to the lamp]

Outside, the board began to glow.

Gongsun Ce was recording wagers in his little bet-book when a red line crept down the ninth column. His brush stopped. He knew the cavern records well enough to understand what that line meant, and he waited for the name to appear.

The characters carved themselves, one stroke at a time, into stone that no tool had touched for a century. Shi Feng. Ring nine.

“The board!”

“It's writing!”

“Column nine!”

“There's a name on column nine!”

“Who touched it?”

“…He walked past the elders.”

Mu Gang stared at the new name. His teacup slipped from his hand and broke. He didn’t even look down at the pieces.

“Ring nine,” He Zhen said slowly, sitting down on his stool without having decided to. “Nobody has stood on ring nine in a hundred years. The waves behind push the waves ahead.”

“Lin Langtian has,” a voice said from the back.

“Lin Langtian doesn't count,” He Zhen said. “He cheats with a chair.”

Gongsun Ce looked back at his wager. His stopped brush had left a large blot across it. He closed the book and tucked it into his sleeve. There was no point pretending he could still judge Shi Feng by his old record.

“He is going to be a problem for the third round,” Gongsun Ce said, to nobody.

When Shi Feng walked out of the cavern mouth, with the tally in one hand and singed sleeves, the black glass slope went completely silent. Two hundred people looked at the ruined face, and at the tally, and at the glowing column.

Zhu Liu pushed through the crowd, crying, holding out a single copper-bright stone.

“Your deposit, Senior Brother,” Zhu Liu said. “Refundable.”

“Thank you,” Shi Feng said, and took it.

Zhu Liu wrote the refund in his receipt book and underlined it twice.