Chapter 583 — A Finger-Width a Night

CHAPTER 583

A Finger-Width a Night

[Wall: spirit-eating stone. Devour: now.]

“Now,” Shi Feng agreed, and pushed the mat aside.

The sigil sat in the dark at the foot of the shelf, the circle, the upright line, the three short bars. Below it was the dot, a hole the size of a fingertip. It had sat there for weeks while the Ledger said not yet.

The Visitor wouldn’t wait forever. When patience failed, he might return with the binding pill and stop asking Shi Feng to take it willingly. Shi Feng didn’t know how long he had. That uncertainty made each quiet night valuable.

So I’d better start eating, Shi Feng thought.

He took the spoon from his supper bowl and set its handle into the dot-hole. The stone was hard and cold and faintly greedy. It drank the qi out of the air around it, slowly and steadily, and that was why his Spirit Sense had never once got through these walls.

He scraped. A pinch of grey powder came away. He tipped it onto his tongue and swallowed.

Pain hit the moment he swallowed.

Shi Feng doubled over on the floor with both arms around his stomach and his forehead against the stone. For twenty breaths he couldn’t think at all. Then the Physique closed on the grit, and something thin and sour ran out of it into his meridians.

Shi Feng nearly laughed despite the pain. The wall consumed qi, and his Physique could consume the wall itself. The captors hadn’t known that when they locked him in. He had to learn its limits before risking a larger mouthful.

He ate a finger-width that night, and not a grain more.

“Station nine,” Clerk Shu said the next cycle. “Three. Pass. Quota met.”

His voice was as flat as ever. Shi Feng bowed over his furnace with a grey face and sweat on his lip.

“Look at him! Like a man who swallowed a frog!” Kong Ba boomed. “Did you eat the slag raw again, boy?”

“The food, Overseer Kong,” Shi Feng said weakly. “I think it disagreed with me.”

Through the arch, Ji Yuanhe’s lid-hammer gave three quick taps and a dull one. Bad food. Then it went straight back to the rhythm, as if nothing had happened.

Shi Feng tapped the rim of his furnace once. Fine. The old man’s hammer didn’t answer, but it came down a little softer on the next beat.

By the ninth night, the dot-hole was as deep as his thumb was long.

That night, when he laid his hand over it and reached, his Spirit Sense went through.

His Spirit Sense reached beyond the cell: rows of stone rooms, a man coughing four doors down and a guard asleep at the bend with his boots off. Then it found three thousand three hundred scratches in an empty cell. Shi Feng knew whose they were.

Pei Wuyan’s cell. They hadn’t even swept it.

The tally rows were there too, the dead men’s fives running down behind the shelf, his own beside them on the back wall, and under his, the single deep stroke he’d cut for Pei. From the outside it looked very small.

The slot in the door clicked. Shi Feng snatched his hand back.

“Here,” Bao Liang grumbled, pushing a twist of paper through. “Stomach powder. You’ve been groaning for three nights, and I’ve had to listen to it.”

“Thank you, Guard Bao,” Shi Feng said, surprised. “I didn’t think anyone would bring medicine.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m paid by the shift, not by the death,” Bao Liang said. “If you die on my shift, there’s a report. I hate writing reports.”

Shi Feng sniffed the powder. It was ordinary chalk and ginger, with nothing hidden in it. Bao Liang had actually brought him medicine. He swallowed it, grateful for the small relief, and returned to the hole once the guard’s footsteps faded.

[Reservoir: 60%]

A week later, his sense climbed the corridor.

It went up the ramp, past Hall Two’s banked furnaces, past the arch where Ji Yuanhe’s hammer still kept time in the dark. It went past two turnings and a long stair, all the way to where the air changed and smelled of rain and moss.

The outer gate.

Two men sat on either side of it, on plain wooden stools. Neither of them was looking at the gate. They had their eyes half closed, and their heads tilted a little toward the inside of the mountain.

The moment his sense touched them, Shi Feng knew what they were. Two vast, quiet pressures, far beyond anything a Soul Formation cultivator gave off. By the same grade notes that had named the Visitor, these two were Shattering Void.

His sense brushed the nearer one’s sleeve, very lightly. Shi Feng held his breath in his cell, two hundred steps below.

The warden shivered and pulled his robe tighter.

“Damp’s early this year,” the warden muttered.

“It’s the river,” the other warden said, without opening his eyes. “Hush. Listen.”

They went back to listening. Not to the gate, and not to the road. They were listening to the mountain. To the furnaces breathing, and the boots in the corridors, and one old man’s hammer, keeping its count.

They can hear him from here, Shi Feng thought, frightened by the distance. Ji Yuanhe’s counting was keeping those two men’s attention on the halls. He couldn’t let his own curiosity disturb it.

Shi Feng drew his sense back down the stair very slowly, one step at a time, and lay on the floor in the dark with his heart pounding.

They don’t watch the gate, he thought. They listen to the counting.