Chapter 561 — Carrot and Stick

CHAPTER 561

Carrot and Stick

“Look,” Ning Zhe said. “Then tell me what you think.”

The lamp had brightened before they came for him. Shi Feng guessed it was morning, but nobody told him the hour. Two silent men in grey had walked him down the corridor, one in front and one behind. They weren't touching him. They didn't need to.

The room Ning Zhe opened was long and cool, and its walls were lined to the ceiling with jade drawers.

“Soul Formation-grade herbs,” Ning Zhe said, sliding one open. “Hundred-year dragon-bone orchid. Nine-sun cinnabar. Thousand-fold marrow root, three whole stalks. No ledger. You write what you use and we replace it. Nobody here counts.”

Shi Feng looked into the drawer.

In the whole Sky Pavilion tower at Qingyun City, there hadn't been a single stalk like that. Master Ruan would have wept at the sight of it. Even Sima Lan would've found it hard to value that drawer. Here, the herbs were meant to make a locked room seem worth accepting.

Nobody counts, he thought. A man who says that has already counted.

“That's the carrot,” Ning Zhe said. “You wanted conditions. Here are mine. A furnace of your own. A room with a window, once you've settled. Pills for your own cultivation, from anything you like, and I do mean anything. And years.” He closed the drawer gently. “A Soul Formation pill can add decades to a cultivator's life. We have a few that add more. They are not for sale. They're given to cooperative hands.”

“And Marks?” Shi Feng asked.

“The Pavilion's paper stops where the Pavilion chooses to stop,” Ning Zhe said. “We don't use their paper. Within a year, a four Mark pill, in your hands, in a furnace no tower on the frontier owns.” Ning Zhe smiled. “A boy your age with a four Mark. Imagine what the Pavilion would pay to see that.”

“The Pavilion doesn't deal with you,” Shi Feng said.

For half a breath, Ning Zhe's smile stayed exactly where it was.

“It doesn't,” Ning Zhe agreed. “That has never troubled us. Come. You've seen the carrot. I want you to see why nobody asks for the stick.”

He led Shi Feng back down the corridor. They passed Shi Feng's own door, and a second door, and then the corridor opened into a short wide hall with a low ceiling.

A furnace sat in the middle of it.

It was old black iron on three legs, burning with a steady blue flame. A man sat cross-legged in front of it. He was thin, almost folded in on himself, in a plain robe that had once been fine. His hair had gone white at the temples. His hands moved on the furnace lid with a calm, fast, practised rhythm, adding, turning, adding. A thin black cord ran from his left ankle to a ring in the floor.

He didn't look up.

On a tray beside him were rows and rows of pills, glossy and pale gold. Shi Feng saw at once that they were perfect. Every one of them. Not one waste pill in the tray.

“Master Ji has been with us since last spring,” Ning Zhe said. “He is our most reliable guest. Aren't you, Master Ji?”

“Four hundred and twelve,” Ji Yuanhe said to the furnace.

His voice was flat and dry. He sounded exhausted, but his hands never slowed. He added a root. He turned the flame.

“He counts,” Ning Zhe said. “It keeps him steady.”

Shi Feng studied his gaunt, tired face, trying to recognise the man beneath the sunken cheeks. He thought of the story from the Assembly. A 2 Mark alchemist from Hongye Kingdom. He stepped into the air in the middle of a market. Forty witnesses. A pickle seller who had been written up for drinking.

“Master Ji,” Shi Feng said quietly. “Ji Yuanhe, of Hongye?”

The man's hands stopped.

It lasted only a heartbeat. The pill in his fingers trembled. Then Ji Yuanhe went back to the furnace, and he spoke without turning his head, in a whisper so low that Shi Feng almost lost it under the flame.

“Don't,” Ji Yuanhe whispered, his gaze fixed on the flame. “They listen to the counting.”

“That's enough,” Ning Zhe said, still pleasant, and Ji Yuanhe went on turning the lid. “He is allowed the corridor. That is what cooperation buys. The other men, the ones who weren't cooperative, have a room like yours. Without the door that opens in the morning.”

Ning Zhe rested a hand on Shi Feng's shoulder. The touch was light; Shi Feng still couldn't sense the man behind it.

“You see, Alchemist Shi?” Ning Zhe asked, leaving his hand on the shoulder. “I never raise my voice. I simply let things be seen.”

Shi Feng looked at Ji Yuanhe's ankle, and at the cord, and at the rows of perfect pills.

The cord isn't what holds him, he thought.

“I'd like a copy of the catalogue,” Shi Feng said.

“Of what?” Ning Zhe asked.

“Everything from the ring, line by line,” Shi Feng said.

For a moment Ning Zhe only looked at him. Then he smiled, thin and genuinely curious, and opened the folder to make a note.

“Born in Qingshi Town, Great Liang,” Ning Zhe read aloud, running a finger down the page. “Shi clan. Mother…”

He stopped.

His finger rested on one line. He read it, and kept reading it, a beat longer than a line that short should take.

“From the frontier?” Ning Zhe said softly. “…Interesting.”

“What's interesting?” Shi Feng asked.

Ning Zhe closed the folder.

“Nothing,” Ning Zhe said. “A clerk's habit. Come, we're done for today.”

He walked on. He did not look back at the folder again, and he held it a little closer to his chest than before.

Shi Feng followed, and said nothing, and filed that away as one more piece of useful information.