Chapter 588 — The Season for Paper

CHAPTER 588

The Season for Paper

Ning Zhe set his chair down in the doorway of Hall Two, but he didn’t sit in it.

“Good morning, Alchemist Shi,” Ning Zhe said pleasantly. “Clerk Shu. The night book, please.”

“Station nine,” Clerk Shu said, reading from his slate. “Quota met. One practice set, Soul Formation-grade. Five clouds. Minor Success. Eaten.”

“Five,” Ning Zhe said.

He walked down the row of furnaces with his hands folded in his grey sleeves. Kong Ba sat up on his bench with a snort and tried to look as if he’d been awake all night. Ning Zhe didn’t look at him. He stopped at station nine.

Shi Feng stood beside his stool with the rag still in his hand. He made himself look like a boy who’d worked all night and wanted his breakfast.

Ning Zhe drew one finger slowly along the inside wall of the furnace. He lifted it to the lamp. There was no soot on it at all.

“Water that is too clear holds no fish,” Ning Zhe said softly. “Five again, Alchemist Shi, and so tidy?”

Ning Zhe knew what a five-cloud furnace should look like. He’d watched the duel and recorded the result himself. Shi Feng’s frantic cleaning had removed the very traces a normal practice batch should have left.

Shi Feng’s heart beat fast, but his face only went tired and a little sulky.

“I’m tired, Receiver Ning,” Shi Feng said. “Your herbs are heavy. I cleaned up so Overseer Kong wouldn’t shout.” Then he added, in the thin, put-upon voice of a boy being blamed for something that wasn’t his fault, “If my furnace is too tidy, maybe Receiver Ning could send better herbs. Then I’d have something to make a mess with.”

“He does clean a lot,” Kong Ba put in loudly. “Swept the whole floor last week. I told him, Receiver Ning likes things tidy!”

Ning Zhe’s mouth twitched. For one breath he almost laughed.

The amusement passed. Ning Zhe studied him for too long, just as he’d watched him read the catalogue. Shi Feng recognised that patient examination. Any reaction could become another entry in the receiver’s folder.

Shi Feng let him look. Inside, he held the full Reservoir down with both hands and kept his aura as flat as a pond in winter.

“It is the season for paper,” Ning Zhe said at last. “I go upward for ten days. Kong Ba will keep the book.”

Kong Ba sat up straight. “Yes, Receiver Ning!”

“Keep cooking your threes, Alchemist Shi,” Ning Zhe said. “When I come back, we’ll talk about better herbs.”

He walked back up the row, picked up his chair, folded it with a small click and was gone.

Shi Feng bowed to the empty doorway.

Pei Wuyan said Ning Zhe went upward for paper at the season’s turn, always for ten days. The trip was due whether the furnace looked suspicious or not. Shi Feng knew he hadn’t talked the receiver into leaving.

Shi Feng still let out a long, slow breath when the boots faded.

Back in his cell, he lay on the floor with his palm over the hole in the stone and reached.

Ning Zhe was packing. Shi Feng couldn’t read him at all. The ward wrapped him from collar to cuff, and inside it there was nothing. But when Ning Zhe walked down the corridor toward the stair, his left sleeve passed the gap in the wall, and for three steps Shi Feng felt it again.

Thin cold metal. Worn smooth. Three tiny crescents at the head.

He followed it up the corridor. Past the bend, past Hall Two, up the long stair, toward the smell of rain. He held on to it with every thread of his Spirit Sense until his head throbbed.

At the outer gate, the two wardens stood up from their stools. Ning Zhe said something to them that Shi Feng was too far away to hear.

Then the gate opened, and the pin went through it, and it was gone.

Shi Feng lay on the floor for a long time.

Waiting ten days would bring the pin back within reach. It would also bring Ning Zhe back to the furnace he’d inspected and the prisoner he’d studied too closely. Shi Feng lay still, angry at having to choose between his mother’s possession and the escape.

I can’t wait for it, Shi Feng decided. He pressed his hand against the stone until he could make himself withdraw it.

Ji came first. Then the ring and the Sword. Then he’d walk out of this mountain alive. After that, he’d come back for the rest.

The Ledger opened in the back of his mind, and he wrote it down himself.

[Debt: one hairpin]

He’d never left anything owing in his life. He didn’t intend to start with this.

On the night shift, he wound the machine and set it in the soot. Across the arch, Ji Yuanhe’s hammer rang steady on the lid.

Three months had gone into this chance: fear, failed pills, stone dust and ordinary-looking work. Shi Feng checked the machine’s rhythm once more. Ning Zhe’s absence was the opening he’d waited for, and he wouldn’t waste it.

Shi Feng lifted his ladle and tapped the rim of his furnace. Just one word.

He didn’t smile when he did it. For the first time in weeks, there was no grin anywhere in him.

Across the arch, Ji Yuanhe’s hand paused on the lid for half a beat. Then it came down on time.

Tomorrow. Shift change.