Chapter 568 — The Burnt Slip

CHAPTER 568

The Burnt Slip

“Can you read this?” Mei Han asked, and set a jade slip on the table in front of him.

It was the sixteenth day by Shi Feng’s count. The quota was done, and Hall Two smelled of cooling iron. Clerk Shu sat at the end of the table with his abacus. Kong Ba leaned in the doorway, grinning.

The slip’s middle had burned away to stubs.

“The Nine-Ember Marrow Pill,” Mei Han said. “One of the house’s own. The master copy went into a furnace last autumn, and our alchemists have failed it for months.”

Shi Feng saw the nine small flames drawn at the head of the recipe, and his breath caught.

He knew them. They were in the margin of Volume One, beside a recipe the old man had copied out in a cramped, angry hand. Under it Mo Tianheng had written: Their pill. They burn men to make it. I took it back.

Mo Tianheng had stolen their recipe, Shi Feng realised with fierce satisfaction. They’d lost their own copy, while the teacher they hunted had preserved it in a margin. For once, remembering the old man gave him an advantage over the people holding him here.

“Overseer Kong says you can read it. I say you can’t,” Mei Han said. “We’ve bet a jar of wine.”

“Two jars!” Kong Ba shouted. “I raised it!”

“I-I’m only a frontier alchemist, Appraiser Mei,” Shi Feng stammered.

“Look properly, boy!” Kong Ba said, laughing. “Her little brother’s failed it eleven times in Hall One. Every time he fails, they shorten his leash by a…”

“Overseer,” Mei Han said, without turning her head.

“…” Kong Ba said, coughing into his fist.

Mei Han wanted him to succeed. Shi Feng understood that now. She wasn’t betting on his genius for amusement; her brother needed the recipe. Remembering a page wouldn’t expose his strength, so he could help without admitting what else he knew.

“Could I have a brush?” Shi Feng asked timidly.

He wrote slowly, stopping now and then as if he had to think. He didn’t. The old man’s page stood in his head. Ember root, raised whole, banked in the ash bed three fingers deep. Nine-sun cinnabar at the second boil. Marrow root last, sliced against the grain.

Mei Han laid the slip beside his paper and matched his characters to the stubs, one by one.

“Forty-four stubs,” Clerk Shu said at last. “Forty-four fits.”

“Ha! Two jars!” Kong Ba slapped the doorframe so hard that dust fell. “You can’t judge a man by his face, and you can’t measure the sea with a bucket!”

“Where did you see this?” Mei Han asked.

“In a frontier tower, once,” Shi Feng said.

“Frontier towers don’t keep this pill,” Mei Han said.

“This one did,” Shi Feng said meekly. “Maybe somebody lost it there.”

Mei Han didn’t believe a word of it, and it didn’t matter. She folded his sheet into her sleeve.

“Appraiser Mei,” Shi Feng said politely, bowing his head like a good boy. “Since the house borrowed my memory, could it lend me a copy of my ring’s catalogue, line by line? So I know what I owe the house.”

“The house keeps its books,” Mei Han said.

“Of course. I only asked,” Shi Feng said humbly.

He wanted that catalogue badly. It would tell him exactly what the house had taken and how it recorded his possessions. Demanding it again would only make Mei Han suspicious. He lowered his eyes and let her refuse.

Giving up a recipe without payment would have offended Lin Langtian. Shi Feng found the thought amusing, but the trade wasn’t useless. A prisoner who helped willingly might be trusted with more work. That could show him parts of the Pit he hadn’t reached yet.

“The rice is already cooked,” Mei Han said at the door. “You’ll refine it. Next cycle.”

The next cycle, Hall Two was cleared for one nervous boy at one furnace. Kong Ba had brought an upturned bucket to sit on and a jar of wine he’d clearly already started.

His plan was four clouds, honest and ordinary. It would prove the recipe and nothing about him.

He followed Mo Tianheng’s margin exactly. He banked the red-veined ember root in the ash three fingers deep and brought the fire up slowly. At the second boil the cinnabar went in.

“First cloud,” Clerk Shu said.

The marrow root went in last.

“Second cloud,” Clerk Shu said.

Then Shi Feng smelled it, thin and bitter, from the ash bed. The root was scorching.

Impossible, Shi Feng thought. Three fingers of ash, and my fire’s lower than he wrote it!

A frightened boy wouldn’t know how to save it, so he dropped the fire like an ordinary alchemist. The two clouds trembled, thinned and sank back into the iron like water into sand.

“Collapsed,” Clerk Shu said. “Two clouds. One failure.”

“Reading’s one thing, boy! Cooking’s another!” Kong Ba roared, nearly falling off his bucket.

“I’m sorry, Appraiser Mei,” Shi Feng said, bowing low. “I don’t know what I did.”

Mei Han poked the ash bed with a rod, and her face didn’t change.

“Operator fault,” Mei Han told Clerk Shu. “Write it down.”

She left. Shi Feng thought of the brother on his leash, and his good mood went with her.

That night in the cell, he ate the scorched lump last. It was bitter, and the herbs’ worth opened in his stomach, exactly the herbs and nothing more. He held the Nascent Soul down while it filled.

[Reservoir: 17%]

Under the taste of the scorch was something the burning hadn’t hidden from his Physique.

Heat.

The root had been warm all the way through. The fire hadn’t done that. It had grown warm, the way roots grow when the soil is kept hot.

Shi Feng sat up.

Pit-grown, Shi Feng thought. Their roots grow in warm soil beside these halls. Mo Tianheng’s recipe used roots from cold earth. Three fingers of ash protected those from the flame. It couldn’t protect a root already heated through.

The recipe hadn’t accounted for that difference. Shi Feng finally understood why following the page exactly had failed. Mei Han had called it operator fault, but nobody in the Pit seemed to know what he’d tasted in the waste pill.

Shi Feng lay back and grinned at the dark.