Chapter 572 — The Average Pill

CHAPTER 572

The Average Pill

“Hands,” Mei Han said. “Both of them. Palms up.”

Shi Feng held them out. She turned them over and back in her ink-stained fingers, the way she turned a pill under the lamp, and pressed the callus along his first finger.

“You stir from the wrist,” Mei Han said. “Frontier habit. Slow, but it doesn’t wander.”

“My teacher was strict about the wrist, Appraiser Mei,” Shi Feng said nervously.

“Your teacher was right,” Mei Han said, letting go. “Graded appraisal. One furnace, Soul Formation-grade, house recipe. I read it, Shu records it, and it goes in the book under your name.”

“One appraisal, begun,” Clerk Shu said, and dipped his brush.

A week had passed since the soup. Today the herbs on the white paper were clean. There wasn’t a single trick on the table.

Mei Han wanted a clean measure of his work. Bad ingredients had tested whether he would notice. Correct ingredients would test whether his recorded limits were real.

Shi Feng considered Ning Zhe’s records. At the public 3 Mark examination, he’d raised four clouds from a Soul Formation-grade pill. Fewer now would look like deliberate resistance. Eight or nine would expose him outright. The appraisal left only one result he could safely show them.

So it had to be four. Minor Success, his public record and not one hair more.

Four clouds again, Shi Feng thought. He almost smiled. Three years ago he couldn’t escape being called a cripple. Now he had to put effort into making sure his captors didn’t learn how far beyond that he’d come.

He lit the fire.

Before his herbs had melted, two guards carried in a tray of pale gold pills from the arch. Mei Han lifted one to the lamp.

“Clear. Eight. No wind at all,” Mei Han said. “Perfect. Nascent Soul-grade.”

“Perfect. In red,” Clerk Shu said.

Out in the arch, Ji Yuanhe’s lid-hammer gave one short tap a breath early, then went on as before. Four hundred and nineteen. Shi Feng tapped his ladle on his furnace rim once, a little too late and a little too cheerfully, and bent back over his work.

The first cloud rose from the lid, then the second. He kept his fire low and his face anxious. The third came up slow and white, and the fourth followed and hung there, steady.

Then the fifth began to gather.

The pill wanted to keep climbing. Not today, Shi Feng thought. A dead fire would show, so he leaned on the steam with the faintest thread of qi instead, pushing down where it wanted to rise. The fifth cloud came out thin, turned pale, and sank back through the lid.

Four clouds hung over the furnace and didn’t move.

“Four,” Mei Han said, without leaving her chair. She waited for the pill to cool and turned it under the lamp. “Even colour. Minor Success. Steady. Unremarkable.”

“Minor Success. In black,” Clerk Shu said, writing.

“Thank you, Appraiser Mei!” Shi Feng said, letting out a shaky breath like a boy who’d just survived an exam.

“Good,” Mei Han said quietly, to herself. “Steady.”

In the doorway, Kong Ba watched the clouds fade and snorted.

“Steady, she says. Hands like that, I’d say lucky,” Kong Ba said. “Trash with lucky hands is still trash.”

“Lucky is fine, Overseer Kong,” Shi Feng said humbly. “I’ll take lucky.”

Kong Ba roared with laughter and went off to tell somebody.

The black-ink appraisal pleased him, but he kept thinking about the fifth cloud. Normally clouds sank when a pill died. This pill was alive. He’d forced the cloud back without destroying it. Shi Feng wanted to understand where it had gone.

“Night shift pays one and a half,” Bao Liang said, lowering himself onto the doorstep of Hall Two with a groan. “One and a half, and my feet hurt exactly the same!”

“That’s not fair at all, Guard Bao,” Shi Feng said meekly, wringing out his rag.

Scrubbing the furnaces after the bell had been his own idea, and Kong Ba had called him a fool for work. The hall was dark except for his own furnace. Twenty paces west, Ji slept curled beside his banked fire.

The day’s root ends and leaf dust waited in a pan at the bench’s end, gathered from all twelve stations. They were burned to prevent theft. Shi Feng tipped them into his furnace. Nobody expected a useful pill from sweepings, which made them suitable for this experiment.

As the mess melted, he laid his palm flat on the lid. Clouds rose because the steam rose and carried the pill’s quality with it. So what happens, he thought, if the steam has nowhere to go?

He pressed down.

The first cloud pushed against his hand, hunting for the gap at the rim. He held it until it folded back and sank. The second sank faster. The sweepings had no third in them.

Ten breaths later he lifted the lid on a small, lumpy brown pill. Deep inside it lay two pale streaks, low and quiet, like mist at the bottom of a well. They stayed.

Shi Feng’s heart beat faster. He tapped the pill against the tongs.

A finished pill hummed when struck, its clouds still wanting to rise. This one made no sound at all.

It’s too quiet, Shi Feng thought. An ordinary guard might miss that. Ning Zhe would not. He’d hear no hum from a finished pill and know its maker was deliberately suppressing something. Keeping the clouds down wasn’t the same as concealing them.

So it isn’t hiding, he told himself. It’s suppression. I can push the sky down. I can’t make it vanish.

“What’ve you got there?” Bao Liang asked, squinting.

“Sweepings, Guard Bao. They stuck together,” Shi Feng said, and put the pill in his mouth.

“Heavens! You’re eating it again?” Bao Liang said in open disgust. “Your stomach must be made of iron!”

The pill went down with every scrap of qi it held. His Nascent Soul stirred, and he held it down like the clouds.

[Reservoir: 34% | Note: the sky can be held down, not hidden. Not yet.]

Soon Bao Liang was snoring against the doorframe. Shi Feng was scrubbing the furnace legs when he noticed the light.

Down the corridor, beyond the arch and Ji’s sleeping furnace, a lamp was moving along the wall. It was slow and even, and it made no sound at all.

Then it stopped.

Nobody walked that corridor after the second bell. Somebody was awake who shouldn’t be.