Chapter 579 — A Wall That Matters

CHAPTER 579

A Wall That Matters

Pei Wuyan spent the first morning complaining about the blanket.

“It has eleven holes,” Pei Wuyan said. “I have counted them twice.”

“You complain well for a dying man, Master Pei,” Shi Feng said through the slot.

“I have had nine years of practice and nobody to complain to,” Pei Wuyan said with dignity. “Let me enjoy it.”

Kong Ba had moved his bucket to a warmer part of the corridor. Between cracking seeds, he shouted to ask whether Pei Wuyan was dead. The old man answered with faultless courtesy every time.

Between the complaints, Pei Wuyan told Shi Feng what he’d learned during nine years of listening.

“The plates on these walls,” Pei Wuyan said quietly, tilting his head at the bronze squares set into the stone every twenty paces. “They drink sound. That is why a furnace bang in Hall Two is never heard in Hall One. Do you know when they drink nothing?”

“Tell me, Master Pei,” Shi Feng said.

“At the sixth bell, a man comes with an ink pot and re-inks them, one corridor at a time,” Pei Wuyan said. “From the first stroke of his brush to the last, the plate in that corridor is blind and deaf. Forty breaths. I have counted it more than a thousand times.”

Forty breaths, Shi Feng thought. It was enough.

“The third bend still holds, by the way,” Pei Wuyan added. “Nothing past it reaches the gate. That has not changed in nine years.”

On the second day, his voice was weaker, but the eyes were still clear.

“Call me Master for the three days, young friend,” Pei Wuyan said. “Not for respect. So the title dies with a user.”

Shi Feng knelt at the slot and knocked his forehead on the stone three times. He set his water bowl on the stone under the slot; the old man’s fingers found the rim.

“The third rule,” Pei Wuyan said.

“At the sixth bell the plates go blind for forty breaths, Master,” Shi Feng said.

Kong Ba heard the knocks and came down the corridor. “Bowing to a dying man for his formula,” Kong Ba said. “Receiver Ning will want that written.” He wrote it in the book he kept that night: Station nine bowed three times, for a recipe.

“The Receiver,” Pei Wuyan said. “He is the one who matters in this house. He goes upward only to fetch paper. Orders, records, new names. Ten days each time, never more and never less. In nine years, he has never once gone upward for anything else.”

“How do you know that, Master Pei?” Shi Feng asked.

“Because when he is gone, the bread is late,” Pei Wuyan said. “Kong Ba keeps the book, and Kong Ba cannot count past his own belly.”

From down the corridor, Kong Ba shouted, “I heard that!”

“Good evening, Overseer,” Pei Wuyan called back.

Shi Feng covered his mouth behind the slot. Kong Ba didn’t know how much more useful his prisoner’s complaints had become.

On the third night, Pei Wuyan didn’t complain at all.

He lay on his back with his hands folded on the blanket with eleven holes and looked at the ceiling. Kong Ba had gone to sleep on his bucket.

“Young friend,” Pei Wuyan said. “When a bird is about to die, its cry is sad. When a man is about to die, his words are kind. So I will say a kind thing, and you will not mock it.”

“I won’t, Master Pei,” Shi Feng said.

“You are going to leave this house,” Pei Wuyan said. “I do not ask how. I do not wish to know. But when you do, put my name on a wall. Not this one. A wall that matters. A tiger dies and leaves its skin. A man dies and leaves his name. I would like to leave mine somewhere the light reaches.”

Shi Feng was silent.

“Pei Wuyan. Three Mark,” Shi Feng said. “Uncooperative. I’ll write that part large.”

The old man smiled at the ceiling.

“Good,” Pei Wuyan said. “Then put another name beside it. My wife’s. She has waited nine years by the river at home, if she is still waiting. Her name is...”

He stopped.

Shi Feng waited. Pei Wuyan’s hands stayed folded on the blanket. His eyes were open, but the next word never came. Shi Feng understood before he called his name.

“Master Pei?” Shi Feng asked.

Nothing.

He stayed at the slot a long time. Then Shi Feng took the bowl’s edge to the back wall, beneath his scratched rows of days. He cut one deep, straight mark apart from them. It was the only record he could give Pei Wuyan here.

It wasn’t a day. It was a man.

In the morning, two guards carried the cot away. Kong Ba stretched, scratched his belly and looked at the empty space.

“There goes the stubborn one,” Kong Ba said. “Nine years. Never cooked a single pill for us.”

He said it the way a man talks about bad weather. Then he went off to report.

The breakfast bowl came through the slot half full. The docking for the short furnace had finally reached the kitchen.

Shi Feng ate his half without a word.

At the arch that day, Ji Yuanhe’s hammer kept its four beats, as always. But once, at the end of a bar where no beat belonged, it came down one more time. It was slow and heavy, and it wasn’t part of any count.

Nobody in Hall Two noticed. Nobody in Hall Two had ever spoken to Pei Wuyan.

That night, Shi Feng ate the quota waste and held his Nascent Soul down as usual. He felt no pleasure in the gain. Pei Wuyan had been clear enough to ask for his wife’s name beside his own, and now that name was gone.

[Reservoir: 46% | Debt: Pei’s name on a wall that matters]

He lay on his shelf and looked at the single stroke under the rows until the lamp-stone went dark. There was supposed to be a second name beside it, and he would never know what it was.

When he reached Hall Two the next cycle, Mei Han was waiting at station nine with a sealed paper in her hand.