Chapter 566 — Fed and Watched

CHAPTER 566

Fed and Watched

The pit was a square shaft lined with white lime, deeper than the lamplight reached. A draught came up out of it, cold, smelling of wet stone and moving water.

River, Shi Feng thought.

A sealed shaft wouldn’t have a draught. Shi Feng noted the direction of the cold air and kept it in mind with the bell timing and the cold flue. There had to be an opening somewhere, even if it was far below him.

“Go on, tip it,” Bao Liang said. “My feet aren’t getting any younger.”

Shi Feng tipped the cart. His hand slid along the rim to steady it, and his own three lumps went into his sleeve instead of into the dark.

He wasn’t quite quick enough with the last one.

“What’s that?” Bao Liang asked, frowning.

Shi Feng’s face crumpled. He held up the lump, small and black and ugly.

“I wanted to keep one,” Shi Feng said, his voice shaking. “To remember my shame.”

“Your shame, your sleeve. Each man sweeps the snow from his own doorstep,” Bao Liang said with a shrug. “Just don’t eat it. The last fellow who licked one screamed for two days.”

“I won’t, Guard Bao,” Shi Feng promised earnestly.

Bao Liang never knew there were three.

In the cell, Shi Feng put the first lump in his mouth and bit down.

It tasted of burnt earth and bitter bark. Then the Physique took hold, and qi poured out of the ruined pill, the full worth of every herb that had gone into the furnace.

The Nascent Soul in his dantian stirred and began to swell.

No, Shi Feng told it.

He couldn’t allow his Nascent Soul to swell. Ning Zhe was already watching him; a brighter aura would ruin the frightened-boy disguise. Shi Feng stubbornly held the soul at its present size. The unused qi sank into the Physique’s Reservoir instead. It would remain there until he could use it safely.

He ate the second lump, then the third.

Three more cycles went the same way: three failures, once four, a miserable face begging for the cart, a few lumps into the sleeve at the lip of the pit.

On the fourth night, chewing the last lump, Shi Feng noticed what nobody had done.

Nobody had searched his sleeves again.

Ning Zhe had turned them out in front of the whole hall for one cold potato. A man that careful didn’t forget a sleeve. He chose not to look.

[Devoured: quota waste x14 | Gain: the herbs’ worth, exactly | Note: they know, and let it run. I am being fed and watched.]

[Reservoir: 10%]

Ning Zhe was testing him, Shi Feng realised. He wasn’t hiding the waste pills from the receiver at all. The receiver wanted to learn what eating them would do.

He almost laughed at himself. They collected strange things, and he was a prisoner who ate failed pills. Let them study his stomach. As long as his Nascent Soul didn’t grow, they’d miss where the qi was going. The food was excellent; he only wished he could choose when to leave.

“One,” Clerk Shu said the next day. “Pass.”

Kong Ba leaned in the doorway of Hall Two, cracking melon seeds and spitting the shells on the floor.

“Fourteen failures and the boy still shows up smiling,” Kong Ba said. “A dead pig doesn’t fear boiling water, eh, Shu?”

“Not in the ledger,” Clerk Shu said.

Through the arch, twenty paces west, Ji Yuanhe’s furnace burned. Ji beat time on his lid with a small iron hammer, four beats to a bar, the fourth heavier. Tak, tak, tak, tok. Between the bars the furnace drew its breath, slow and deep.

This time the breath came a hair flat.

Shi Feng’s ladle stopped above his herb jar. Nobody else would hear it, but Ji’s fire was running hotter than the furnace believed.

Your fire is lying to you, friend, Shi Feng thought.

The third herb hissed too sharply. Shi Feng was alarmed. Adding it before the fire settled would make it swell inside the pill. A Nascent Soul-grade furnace could hold that pressure for about eleven breaths. Then the lid would blow straight toward Ji Yuanhe’s hands and eyes.

Eleven.

He couldn’t shout. A shout would tell the hall that the frightened boy at station nine could hear a 2 Mark’s fire over twelve other furnaces. And Ji had warned him himself: they listen to the counting.

Ten.

So Shi Feng tapped his ladle on the rim of his herb jar. He matched Ji’s rhythm for three beats and brought the fourth down one breath early.

In every frontier furnace hall, a master who saw an apprentice’s fire running hot rapped the lid early to warn him. It was the oldest warning there was. Ji Yuanhe had stood at furnaces for forty years. Shi Feng was betting everything that some part of him still remembered.

Nine.

Kong Ba stopped cracking seeds.

“What’s that racket?” Kong Ba said loudly. “The nervous boy’s fidgeting again! Half a bucket of water sloshes the loudest, eh, Shu?”

“Still not in the ledger,” Clerk Shu said, without looking up.

“S-sorry, Overseer Kong,” Shi Feng stammered, ducking his head. “My hands shake when the fire’s high.”

He didn’t stop tapping.

Kong Ba snorted and went back to his seeds.

Shi Feng wished Lin Langtian could see this. His senior brother had taught him to bluff and haggle, but not how to send a warning under a whole hall’s eyes. He kept the rhythm deliberately clumsy. Ji Yuanhe had to hear it without Kong Ba understanding why.

Seven. Six.

Tak, tak, tak, tok, went Shi Feng’s ladle, early on the fourth beat.

Tak, tak, tak, tok, went Ji Yuanhe’s hammer, exactly on time.

The furnace in the arch drew another breath, flatter than the last.

Four.

Ji’s hammer rose. Shi Feng brought his ladle down early one more time, as hard as he dared.