Chapter 559 — The Dim Chamber

CHAPTER 559

The Dim Chamber

The first thing Shi Feng noticed was that his hand was bare.

He lay on a stone shelf with a thin mat on it. Above him was a grey ceiling, and the light came from one pale lamp-stone set in a niche by the door. It gave about as much glow as a dying candle. No window. No wind. The air was dry and tasted faintly of cold metal.

He lifted his right hand and looked at his finger. The storage ring was gone.

So was the Sword on his back. So was the herb case at his belt. His robe was still on him, and so were his boots. Somebody had searched him carefully and then left him dressed.

Shi Feng sat up slowly and checked himself.

His meridians were open. His Nascent Soul sat in his dantian, calm and whole, and the qi ran through his body as freely as it had in the Luoxia alley. Nothing was bound. Nothing was pressed down. He looked inward for the thread of a seal, then for the trace of a poison, and found neither.

Then he reached out with his Spirit Sense.

It went about a hand's breadth and stopped. The walls didn't push it back. They swallowed it. He tried again, then harder, but couldn't sense anything beyond the same strip of stone. His Spirit Sense lay flat against the stone, blind.

So that's how it is, Shi Feng thought. Qi, they leave me. Sight, they take.

He let the Spirit Sense draw back and looked at the door with his eyes instead. Dark iron, no handle on his side. Low in the door was a narrow slot, the width of a bowl.

The Ledger answered without being asked.

[Seal: none. Note: they did not think one necessary.]

Shi Feng read the line twice. Then he remembered what the voice in the sky had said. Younger than the list says.

They had a list. And he was on it. They had looked at an early Nascent Soul, found him a manageable size, and decided a locked door was enough.

He put his hand into his left sleeve out of habit. The chalk stub was gone, and so was the green paper. So was the hairpin. His fingers found only something round and lumpy.

He drew it out. It was a roasted sweet potato, wrapped in a square of oiled paper, and it had gone cold long ago. Lin Langtian had pressed it into his hands at the sect gate, the day the trip began. For the road. Don't eat it unless you need to.

Shi Feng looked at it for some time.

They had searched the ring and herb case, taken his mother's hairpin, and left him this. They must have considered it harmless. Shi Feng held the cold potato tightly before putting it away.

He put it back in his sleeve. Not now.

His thoughts went where he had been trying to stop them from going. The alley. The hawthorn peddler with a stick of red fruit. Ling Qingzhu turning around with her hand raised and her eyes bright, and the next breath the place where she had been standing was only a wall and a patch of sky.

From her side, he had simply vanished. In the middle of a step. In front of her.

He closed his hand.

She'll tear the city apart, he thought. And she won't tell anyone she's looking.

Nothing he could do about that from here. Not yet. He made himself breathe once, twice, three times, the way he had in the long cripple years, when breathing was the only thing left that was his.

Footsteps came down the corridor. They were slow and even, and they stopped at the door.

The slot opened. A bowl slid through, steaming, with a pair of chopsticks across the rim.

“Eat,” the guard said from the dark. It sounded bored and not especially unkind. “Receiver Ning wants you clear-headed when he comes.”

“Where am I?” Shi Feng asked.

“Eat,” the guard repeated, ignoring the question.

“Who's Receiver Ning?” Shi Feng asked, looking through the narrow slot.

“The one who'll answer that,” the guard said. “Not me. I'm paid by the shift.”

Shi Feng looked at the bowl. Rice, pickled greens, a few strips of pork. He bent over it and sniffed, then checked it with the tip of his qi. No poison. No sedation. Only rice.

“It isn't drugged,” the guard said. “If we wanted you asleep, you'd be asleep.”

Shi Feng picked up the chopsticks.

He ate slowly, and while he ate he counted the corridor. Eleven steps from the door to the first turn. A second set of footsteps far away, going the other direction. Somewhere beyond the stone, so faintly that he almost missed it, a furnace was burning. He knew the sound of a furnace. The air moved through it in slow, steady draws. He listened for the pause between them, trying to judge how far away it was.

When the bowl was empty, he set it back on the slot.

The slot closed. The footsteps went away. The lamp-stone dimmed a little more.

Shi Feng sat back against the wall and waited. He had been taken by people who didn't fear him. That was the first piece of useful information he had.

He intended to keep it that way.