Chapter 580 — The Sealed Order

CHAPTER 580

The Sealed Order

“A sealed order,” Mei Han said, and broke the wax. “Six hundred Steady Heart pills. Twelve days.”

She laid the paper on his bench. It was thicker than the Pit’s own paper, with a black seal at the top and no name anywhere on it. At the bottom, in a small hand, someone had written the destination.

A frontier region.

“For whom, Appraiser Mei?” Shi Feng asked timidly.

“It doesn’t say,” Mei Han said. “Sealed orders never say. They’re cooked exactly as written, not one straw changed. That’s the rule.”

Shi Feng read the formula. Seven herbs. Steady Heart was the kind of pill a sect gave its outer disciples to calm them before a fight.

The sixth was a grey root as thin as a finger, and the porter had already set a bundle of it on his tray.

Shi Feng leaned over to look, and the Physique recoiled.

The Physique recoiled from the grey root. Scorched slag, ember-bark and Deity Transformation-grade waste had never made it do that. Shi Feng kept leaning over the tray as though checking the ingredients, hiding his alarm while he examined what it had sensed.

He read the formula again more slowly, and the structure stood up off the page.

The first five herbs calmed the heart. The sixth tied itself to whatever they calmed. The seventh hid the sixth. One pill would do nothing. A hundred, taken over a season, would leave a heart that stayed calm only when told to.

It wasn’t medicine. It would make disciples obedient, while the seventh herb concealed the harm. They’d take it willingly because their own sect handed it to them.

And it was going to a frontier region.

Shi Feng was furious. Those disciples were from the frontier, his home, whoever they belonged to. He hid the anger and let Mei Han see a boy overwhelmed by the order.

“Is there a problem, Alchemist Shi?” Mei Han asked.

“N-no, Appraiser Mei,” Shi Feng said. “It’s just a lot of pills.”

“It’s twelve days,” Mei Han said. “Five furnaces a day, ten pills to a furnace. Station nine is fast enough.”

She turned to go. Then she stopped and spoke without looking back.

“If a station refuses a sealed order,” Mei Han said, “the cord on the west furnace is shortened by a hand. One hand for each day refused.”

She walked through the arch. Ji Yuanhe’s hammer went on, tak, tak, tak, tok.

Shi Feng sat at station nine and did his sums.

Refuse, and Ji paid for it a hand at a time. The old man’s cord was already short enough that he slept curled around his furnace.

Make it, and six hundred leashes went north to somebody’s disciples.

That left the third way. Fail it, honestly and completely, in a way nobody could prove.

He looked at the formula one more time and found the line he wanted.

Bank the grey root in the ash bed, three fingers deep.

Shi Feng nearly laughed out loud.

The upstairs formula assumed cold-grown roots, just as Mo Tianheng’s old page had. Pit-grown roots were warm through the centre. Shi Feng learned on his sixteenth day that three fingers of ash couldn’t protect them. Mei Han had already recorded the soil problem in her book.

I won’t change anything, Shi Feng thought. The rule required him to follow the order exactly. If he did, the grey root would scorch before it could make the leashing pill. He could ruin the shipment without giving them a refusal to punish.

It was the most honest sabotage in the world. He wouldn’t even have to drop his tongs.

For twelve days, station nine cooked the Steady Heart pill exactly as written.

Shi Feng banked the grey root three fingers deep and brought the fire up slowly, like a good, obedient boy. Every time, at the fourth boil, the bitter smell came up from the ash bed. Every time, the steam thinned and no clouds rose at all.

“Failure,” Clerk Shu said, ten pills at a time. “Failure. Failure.”

On the third day, Kong Ba came and stood in the doorway with his arms crossed.

“Fifteen furnaces and not one cloud! Is the boy cursed?” Kong Ba asked loudly. “Station nine made five clouds against Yan Boru last month!”

“Yes, Overseer Kong,” Shi Feng said miserably. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m doing what the paper says.”

On the twelfth day, the six hundredth pill came out of the furnace, a small, grey, lifeless lump like all the rest.

Mei Han came to look.

She picked up a lump with her jade tweezers and broke it open under the lamp. The inside was dull and grainy, and the grey root was charred right through.

She held it to her nose and sniffed once.

“Ash-bed scorch,” Mei Han said.

“Appraiser Mei, I followed every line,” Shi Feng said in a small voice.

“I know you did,” Mei Han said. “I watched you do it.”

She opened the black-bound book and wrote. Shi Feng read it upside down.

Root fault. Pill Pit soil. Order formula unsuited to house-grown stock. Operator not at fault.

She hadn’t blamed him. She honestly believed it.

Mei Han rubbed the grey ring under her left cuff with her right thumb. She watched the six hundred failed pills for one breath. Shi Feng couldn’t tell what she felt, but she didn’t hurry to hide the ruined batch or change her verdict.

Then she took her hand away, and nothing else showed on her face at all.

“Into the cart,” Mei Han said. “All of them.”

She left. Behind her, Bao Liang looked at the twelve heaped trays and groaned.

“Six hundred!” Bao Liang wailed. “That’s the heaviest load in eleven years, and they still pay by the shift!”

Shi Feng bowed his head sadly over the trays.

Six hundred pills of waste, every herb’s worth still inside. He intended to eat every single one of them.